Hello,
For some reason when playing the game will switch to desktop, not crash. I select the skyrim on the program bar and it will bring back the screen but all black and I have to hit my mouse buttons a few times for the game to come back up. When it switches to the desktop I don't see anything else that popped up to take control in the foreground. It happened to me last night a couple of times in a few minutes but then didn't happen for the rest of my gaming session. I looks through topics but didn't really see anything related to this. Just scary as it could happen at a wrong time and it takes me a little time to get it back. Well thanks for any suggestions. Thanks.

You've got something running in the background stealing focus. It doesn't have to "pop up" to do that.

Do you run anything like Rainmeter or other desktop customization software? If not, what is running in the background besides the normal Windows processes?

/\ this, pretty much.

A good piece of software for just this sort of thing is Gameboost - you can use it to turn off services/processes/etc... that don't need to be running when you are playing.

I had this prob when HP printer software was installed. The only fix I found was to kill a couple of unnecessary HP processes in the background, used MSConfig to turn one off, the other I deleted from the HP directory it ran from (actually moved it to a different backup folder). The software still worked as it should after that. When I rebuilt the OS I refused to install that insidious intrusive software that also was constantly adding to my network traffic. Yours may not be HP, but similar activity. It is a third-party software prob. GL.