I hadn't had time to play Skyrim since the new update came out. When I finally did today, I encountered an issue that makes it impossible to access my game:

Selecting "Continue" will cause the game to crash to the desktop immediately after a second- sometimes one of the loading screen images will appear for a second before CTD. This also happens when trying to load any old save game.

Selecting to start a new game causes the game to stop at the dragon logo, with occasional smoke-- the music is playing, animations are going on, but the game never moves away from it into the actual scenario, the process has to be closed manually.

In short- the game has been rendered unplayable to me. I have tried the sound fix, as well as setting all graphic settings to low--- same issue.