I'm trying 12.1a preview drivers from ATI and so far zero problems, informs of any instability ...
Sorry for my English.

Just an FYI - Both Blue Screen's and CTD's can be caused by Software (Skyrim), OS (Windows), and Hardware. Not sure where the Blue Screen = Skyrim and CTD = OS/hardware Blue Screen = OS/hardware and CTD = Skyrim, thing got started but it's totally incorrect.

After a great catalyst testing under 12.1a think these are much more stable and although I sometimes I have noticed that excessive GPU load when it reaches 100% artifacts begin to appear, but now with the Catalyst 12.1a is all more stable. How I can reduce this burden Skyrim GPU?. In any game except in this experiment that gpu load.
My FPS are about 45 to 60 with vsync, Graphics ULTRA.
GPU temperature 74 o MAX.
GPU load between 70% and 100%.
All tested with MSI Afterburner.

Try on High settings rather than Ultra.

Its the reverse, Skyrim seems to have a rather good signal handler built in that controlled-crashes to desktop (no warnings but hey) and I've yet to see the application actually do anything worse. Meanwhile and without fail hardware and driver problems can and do tend to result in more harsher crashes like blue screens and flat out hard resets etc.

Killdani I'm glad to hear you are getting it running..
As the others suggested try lowering settings to high -s-

That option consumes more graphic?, Not to lose much quality ...

Oops, gotta proofread more. That's what I meant. Somewhere, someone started saying 'CTD's = Skyrim issue and Blue Screen's = OS/hardware'.
If hardware (CPU, chipset, memory, video card) is hitting a thermal threshold (for example) then you can very easily have CTD's. I used to overclock the snot out of my hardware and would regularly suffer from CTD's in Morrowind. I would fix them by turning the clocks (CPU, memory, video card) down to a stable level. Contrarily, if the program (Skyrim) has a severe memory leak, makes calls to non-accessible memory, or does one of a hundred other OS no-no's, you can have a Blue Screen easily.

In the case here....Blue screen + Artifacts + Skyrim = Running to hard. Check the GPU clocks. If overclocked from factory (!) set to stock refenence clocks. Clean all fans, Is this a newer 57 series card or have you been "gamin the crap out the card"?<,TM

Lower the shadows to medium and everything else follows in ULTRA. So far no blue screen and no artifacts. The FPS after this change are almost identical. Skyrim A Bug?

Do you now how to disable shadows,grass completely ?
I know that you can toggle grass and trees in console with tg and tt but is there another way so that shadows and grass doesn't load in memory?

in skyrimprefs you'll find bdrawshadow, set that to 0, you'll also find two lines referencing grass draw distances, set them both to 0. Tada!

In loading vegetation I have no problem. In general, I have no problems in charges. The FPS are pretty good on exterior and interior, with a median of 45 and 60 FPS with the Vsync option activate. There are no problems with the shadows in the medium. The problems happen when you enable the opcion "ultra" of the shadows, blue screens, artifacts..., although all of this I have not tested 100%.

I have to keep my shadows at high (everything else at Ultra) because it's too much of a performance hit, especially inside, with multiple light sources. I've got my ugrids setting to 7 though, and still get acceptable frame rate and much less 'pop in' of objects as I'm moving through the landscape. It took me a while but I've found a good balance between eye-candy and playability of course now I'm hitting some of the quest bugs :S

I think the problems are due to the high usage of CPU and GPU ... the values ??are very high.

I think it's your Video Memory...

Try your video memory with http://majorgeeks.com/Video_Memory_Stress_Test__d5896.html

Memory leaks (in user-mode applications) most certainly will not cause blue screens, but once there's no more memory to available to an application, it will often crash (either it has no checks against this and crashes trying to access memory at 0x00000000, or will 'gracefully' shutdown due to not being able to continue operating normally).
Making calls to non-accessible memory results in Windows raising an exception (0xC0000005 access violation) and nothing more (apps usually crash/are terminated (Unhandled Exception), because they're not programmed to handle it).

There should be nothing a user-mode application can do to cause blue screens, but they can trigger underlying issues (like bugs in drivers) that can cause blue screens or cpu resets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_fault).

You should probably back up your facts. Please do point me if I'm wrong somewhere, I have no experience from programming kernel-mode stuff.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/01/understanding-user-and-kernel-mode.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_protection_fault

I had the same problem as you with an radon hd 5700 card, win 7 64bit but an amd system.
Bluescreens from time to time, however then I tried to add some texture mods the time between crashes went down fast, bought an hd 6800 card and no blue screen afterward.

Old card worked well in Oblivion, Fallout 3, New Vegas and wow, was also fast enough for Skyrim. I bought a card online and because of the return policy I could return it if I did not like it. Testing a card from a friend is faster.

Granted that BSOD are technically PC-created but, surely, some games can trigger them?

In a perfect storm of really bad programming mixed with a weak driver or over-taxed hardware of some kind perhaps. Ultimately a game is just an app, part of the OS and the drivers job description includes ensuring that no matter what an app asks for it will not create a situation that the system on a whole cannot handle (a BSOD). I've seen the gamebryo based games generate them when no other game can but its always come back to the video driver vs the video card being set beyond its means and the gamebryo engine's rather unique ability to expose memory clockrate instability, as an example.

Very true. On the other hand you can go to just about any games' forum and find examples of people who say that game provokes crashes/blue screens when no other does, so it doesn't really seem specific to Skyrim, just that each game uses resources in different ways - hit a particular usage that exposes a weakness of your system and you get problems.

i see "Driver Sweeper" mentioned

anyone else have a driver cleaning program that they reccommend ?