Have been playing Skyrim since day one with no issues. Even with mods. Until now, that is.

I have no problems getting to the main menu. I have no problems getting to the loading screen. But after that, that's where everything goes to hell.
The game will jam at the loading screen with the appropriate sounds from the point where I've saved still playing in the background. Like if I saved near a river, the river's ambient effects can still be heard. If i swing my weapon while still jammed at the loading screen, I can hear the appropriate sound effects. Visually, I am still stuck at the loading screen. Some occasions, it stays stuck like this on the loading screen. Other times, it CTDs with the following message - Display driver NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 285.62 stopped responding and has recovered.

I've got a feeling that this whole CTD and jamming issue got triggered when I changed the graphic options from ULTRA HIGH to HIGH.
I've tried three things so far:
- Disabling all mods and running vanilla Skyrim
- Fresh Install with deletion of all .ini files and saved games (I also ran CCleaner after uninstall)
- Changing sound properties -> advanced to Studio Quality 24 bit 96Khz and 48Khz

I'm running Skyrim on an Alienware M17XR3 laptop. Specs are as follows:
-

1.5GB GDDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M

- Windows 7 64-bit OS
- Intel Core i7-2820QM CPU @ 2.30GHz

Anyone able to assist?

Is reinstalling Steam an option or do you have a ton of games? Also does Nvidia have a driver install repair function? Might want to run that....if not maybe uninstall and reinstall your drivers.

Have you tried a clean driver install and reinstalling/repairing DirectX?

Ya werd forgot about direct X not a bad idea.

This could also be Windows 7/Vista related. Check out http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-performance/error-display-driver-stopped-responding-and-has/1b6c2b8b-b0a7-49d9-bc3b-e9cc98d51004 page and the link embedded in the first post.

Yep Skyrim is a strange animal and thus my advice start with easier(less time consuming fixes first) and move down the line.

To be honest at first I thought it was going to be the video drivers. but when you said it made a weird sound that leads me to beleave your directx files have either been corrupted or durring an update something happened and only a few .dll files got updated. I really don't know a good way to do a fresh install of directx. there may be some advice on the web to do that or maybe someone that knows more about it can tell you how (if it is even possable) or if there is even a reason to do so. also there may be a way to force the directx install to force updateing of the files instad of updateing files that need it. Im not sure if SFC /scannow works for directx but if it does open command prompt with run as admin and type sfc /scannow.

Direct X is pretty simple as far as I know doing an install of a version you already have will repair anything missing etc.
Assuming you don't have a ton of games and can't figure out what version you need to reinstall. I have about 11 approx between dx 9 and 11.

Yep. That's how it went the last time I had to do it.

Unfortunately, the last time I did it was when Microsoft pulled a bad update less than a day later so it was easier for me to just reinstall the system. Though, that is how it's supposed to work. I just got unlucky. >_>

Yep you never know these days sometime I get a blue screen changing out AMD drivers for my card....and sometimes Win 7 likes to get foolish even though I keep it updated. I blame my crappy HDD Hitachi....never again.....WD Caviar Black 1 TB and a OCZ Agility 2 SSD for Xmas

My HDD svcks so bad it doesn't like 7zip....

so just running an install again will repair it even if there corrupted. thats good to know. well good news then is you have the directx 10 update in the skyrim folder. and for the update to 9.. just get the directx end-user runtime right from microsoft. since skyrim does not use directx 11 you dont have to worry about it. unless you want to install that one too just incase it was corrupted also. I really hope this is the case because it seems to be an easy fix.

Using the DirectX 11 installer is the best option since Windows 7 comes with DirectX 11 and it is possible that the OS is having issues itself.

Gonna recuse myself at this point the first game installed on this rig was DX HR which installed the latest Direct X 11 and Skyrim came a few months after.

Driver stopped responding & has recovered is a known issues called http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg487368, especially with 560 chips. http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=65161. Before you point out that you have Win7 & thus can't have the issues, the issue does happen frequently on Win7 as well. http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=223716.

Lastly, http://www.geforce.com/, you are running a pretty old driver (285.62) which doesn't have any optimization's for Skyrim. Update your drivers & you may not have the issue anymore, or at least potentially not frequently.

Grrrr those things.....my BF3 squadmate gets them at least once a day.....and then there goes my backup.

I less likely cause for this issue is a faulty card that has hardware problems.

The only time I've encountered problems with TDR is with a faulty GPU. I don't think it is necessarily the least likely cause, but I find it highly probable that it is not something that most users reporting the problems are less likely to consider before blaming the drivers or the manufacturer. In many cases, it is due to improper clock settingss, or in unfortunate cases, hardware failure due to prolonged use at improper clock settings.