Greetings,
First off, I'll give a little background info on my pc specs and skyrim info:
AMD Hexacore 2.7
16GB Ram
GeForce 520 1GB GPU
2TB HDD
Windows 7 64bit

Skyrim (latest official patch)
SkyUI
Skyrim Better Map mod. (adds roads to the worldmap)

I've played with these settings for nearly 100 hours, with very few crashes. Yesterday, I purchased myself a new 24" LED monitor to bask in Skyrim's glory, and this is where my problems began. Because I was going from a 19" CRT to a widescreen, I needed to change the resolution. I found the perfect balance of graphics and frames/sec at 1440x900 (I think, currently @ work). The problem is, the game will now hang, while travelling outside in the world, or on the loading screen.

I have read several threads, here and elsewhere with a few suggestions. I copied and deleted my .ini files so Skyrim would reinitialize and detect everything. No change. I read somewhere about excessive saves perhaps being the case... I currently have 3 AutoSaves, 1 QuickSave, and 2 personal saves, not a lot really.

Any suggestions? I'm willing to give the beta patch a try, but was figuring this problem HAS to be related to the new hardware and change in resolutions. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Your basically running the game on a 9500 GT, extremely low end BUT shouldn't be the cause of your problems.

Can you download MSI Afterburner, set it up and monitor your GPU temps. The GPU is gonna be under alot stress when playing this.

Also, Nice CPU.

It's brand-new. Thanks

I do have a temperture program, I will load it up and let skyrim sit idling in the world for a bit and see what happens. It does seem to be happening too early for temperture to be a factor though. Fast-Travelling seems to hang the game immediately, however in the open world, 2 minutes at maximum.

Edit: I should also mention that prior to the crashes, I was playing at 1280x1024 (4:3) with no issues. The new resolution shouldn't be much (if any) more of a strain on my GPU

Edit 2: Also running the latest Nvidia video drivers, which were just released several days ago.

Just in case any mods are reading this, my character is currently situated outside of the Ruins of Bthalft, having just completed heating the Warped Soul Gem for the third time in the Dwarven Convector.

Fast-Travelling to Ivarstead will have the load-screen continue to stay up, even after several minutes. The game will completely hang as soon as I enter Ivarstead if I physically walk there.

Could this be a corrupted save, or is it more likely due to resolution changes?

Go into Device Manager>Monitors and delete whatever is listed. (Right click>Uninstall) Reboot your computer.

Good luck.

Definitely willing to give it a try...
What's your reasoning if I might ask? Potential driver conflict?

(btw, wetcoaster too)

Exactly.

Ok, so perhaps my computer was just having a tantrum over the new monitor... I went home yesterday, fully prepared to try everyone's suggestions, but thought maybe I would Verify Game Integrity first (via Steam). Sure enough, 3 files were 'mismatched' aka corrupted, so steam redownloaded those 3 files. The Skyrim launcher then had me reselect my video settings, I again chose the offending 1440x900, and viola! I played for about 3 hours without any crashes or hanging loading screens.

So thank you to everyone for your suggestions, perhaps a weird string of luck, perhaps the resolution change corrupted something in a config file. Anyhow, problem solved. thanks again.