In the meantime, I bought a new hard drive for the PS3 as I had run out of space, went from the original 60Gb 5400 RPM to a seagate 500Gb 7200 RPM drive and I started playing skyrim again, no new updates installed, only change was the hard drive. My game now works flawlessy. I played for 2 hours last night with no issues, and another hour this morning with no issues, no lag/freezes, nothing.
I am curious, to the others with the PS3 version and running into issues, how full is your hard drive? Are those that claim to have minimal issues on the PS3 have a 7200RPM drive by chance? I can't help but wonder if it was somewhat related, so I thought I would pass along my findings to anyone else who wants to give it a try, whether its the 7200 RPM speed of the drive, or more space on the HD I dont know, but it fixed my game so far.
