I've not played Skyrim in a few months but tried this morning.

It played for about 5 minutes then crashed to Steam. When it did, it did quite a large update (like I said, haven't played in a while...) which took around twenty mins. Started back up and it played for about 2 mins then crashed to Steam. It went to 99% of an update then said it was fine. Tried to run the game again, same thing happened.

I've validated the Steam files which doesn't seem to have helped.

I've played it with no issues up until now - my computer runs it fine with no problems. Is this a known issue to do with a recent update or something?

Am confused.

The "update" you're seeing is probably actually your save files syncing to Steam Cloud. You can disable this if you wish by right-clicking on Skyrim in Steam -> select "Properties" -> Update tab -> uncheck the "Enable Steam Cloud synchronization..." tickybox -> click "Close."

Now, as for why you're crashing, which is another issue entirely...do you run any mods? If so, you may need to check and make sure that the mods you're using are all up to date and working well with the more recent 1.5 updates. Vanilla 1.5 is basically stable (I've had all of one in-game CTD myself; a few more when trying to quit to main menu), although due to the new shadows on grass and underwater shaders features it is a little more taxing on the system. You shouldn't be seeing that many CTDs in a clean game on a decent system.

No mods running at all. Total vanilla game.

Hmm. All right, that's far more troublesome then and is a little outside my realm. To help out the other posters who know more than I do, just a few general questions:

1) Your Skyrim is patched to 1.5.26, yes? I assume so, but just making sure.

2) Can you post your dxdiag (use spoiler tags if you would, please) here?

Emz, is everything on your PC at stock (no overclocking)? Do you have any sort of temperature monitoring software you can check? If not, install this to see what the maximum temps are for your CPU and Video card when you're gaming - http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html. What sort of power supply do you have (model name/number and capacity in watts)? A DXDIAG would be helpful in addition to that.

Edit: got the damn thing working. Apparently I downloaded the high res texture pack while was causing problems. Grr. Thanks for helping guys.

Mods this can be closed.