I noticed that Skyrim updated to the 1.5 patch today and since this would break the game for using Widescreen Fixer as I do I started Steam in Offline Mode to hopefully play wihtout the 1.5 patch until Widescreen Fixer gets updated.

I am using Skyrim Script Extender for some mods and whan I clicked on it to start Skyrim it tells me that it can't find TESV.exe is just gone, it is no longer in the Skyrim base folder and doing a search for it on my whole system does not find it. The tasckbar icon for the actual TESV shortcut (not the SKSE shortcut) is broken.

I did not touch TESV.exe at all so WTF!? Why did it just vanish? Does this ghave anything to do with not updating it?

Steam > Library > Skyrim > Properties > Local Files > Verify integrity of game cache

That should restore TESV.ese, but it'll be a v1.5

Yeah I updated Skyrim and it fixed it but it broke enough things that I can't play it for now. So it absolutely defeated the point.

Pretty sick of the essentially forced updating through Steam.

It's your anti-virus that removes it. For example with ESET NOD32 (that's my case), the creation kit exe and TESV.exe were flagged as virused. You need to configure your AV to ignore them.

I seriously doubt that, I use Norton Business Class and it has never done anything of the sort. I've also had Norton set to sun in Silent Mode. Norton also shows no removals of anything and no flags of anything this entire time.

Post #39 on this thread - someone else has this issue - no solution for you, but you're not alone with this problem.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1360058-looks-like-15-is-out/page__st__30