Ever since 1.5, I haven't been able to see spell animations. This is particularly annoying fighting frost spell casting enemy mages, as you can't see where they're casting their frost spells so you can strafe to the side. I updated my NVIDIA drivers today with the driver update they announced yesterday (got a GeForce GT 220), expecting that to have solved it. That did absolute wonders for my graphics and basicly removed the lag I used to get when playing on High Quality... but it didn't fix my spell animations, which makes absolutely no sense to me. Then again, I'm an absolute caveman when it comes to how computers actually work..

Geforce GT 220 is a pretty weak card if you ask me
could be the case

That may be, but considering things worked just fine with it prior to 1.5, I can't really accept that it's the graphics card that's the issue. Prior to 1.5, the only problem i had with the game was Esbern and a few other characters being glitchy. Common sense dictates that if things worked fine before, and then don't anymore, the cause must lie within what happened between the time when things were working well and the time things turned worse.

Patches can do various things to your game, driver updates as well, go back to the previously driver and see if that help, if not.. get a real graphic card :/ the one you are sitting with is worth like 20 euro.

Delete both Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini, i was having horrible fps drops and lag after 1.5, also had some odd issue with trees not swaying... all went back to normal after deleting those 2 files.