Skyrim was running without any apparent issues on my system yesterday. But today when I attempt to run "Play" from the main menu, it just brings up a small window in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, then errors out with the following error dialog:


Okay, I guess the board won't let me post links to the dialog bitmaps.

Skyrim has stopped working

A problem caused the program to stop working correctly.
Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.


Selecting "Debug" brings up another dialog that suggest some kind of exception failure:

Visual Studio Just-In-Time Debugger

An unhandled win32 exception occurred in TESV.exe [3736]


Attempting to debug with VS yeilds no useful information.

As I stated before, the game was loading an running fine yesterday. There have been no changes to the hardware or software configuration of my system in the interviening time, unless Steam pushed an update that I am unaware of. I have tried restarting the system, and running with no other active applications.

The system configuration is as follows:

Processor: Intel Core2 Q6700 (2.66 GHz)
Memory: 8 GB
Video: XFX Radeon 6870 1GB
OS: Windows 7 SP1 (64-bit)

Any ideas what is going on here?
Is there a data file that may have been corrupted that could cause this behavior?

Thanks.

Okay, well uninstall/reinstall didn't fix it either.