It Soooo doesn't make sense, that it tweaks my brain every time I experience it...

Two people sitting in a room, chatting. My Khajiit slips around the corner, aims his bow, *twang*, down goes one of them. Even before the arrow hits the mark, I'm slipping back out of sight in the next room, hiding behind whatever I can find.

Person 2 jumps up; "What was that??"... sound of weapon sliding out of sheath. "If I find you, you're in big trouble!!".
P2 runs in my general direction, wanders around trying to detect me... after a few seconds:
P2: "huh... guess it was my imagination...", slips weapon back into sheath, steps over dead companion, and sits back down!!

I quietly slip back around the corner, aim, *sproing*, slip back out of sight before arrow lands... but I didn't manage to kill P2 on the first hit.
P2 springs up!! Out comes the weapon, back he comes running, but can't find me.
P2: "I guess there was nothing there after all" (player's thought: so the arrow still sticking out of his side was just fleas or something?);
back into the sheath goes the weapon, back he goes to step over his companion and sit back down calmly.

While I'm certainly grateful for this, it makes my stealth game easier, but it sure is a *duh* moment, especially when it happens over and over...

Glorp??

Glorp indeed.

Lol. Yeah some weird stuff happens like that.

its not perfect but at least it is better than Oblivion, so I approve

This is another example of how the game comes close enough to the mark that people want it to be perfect. The game allows you to pretend to make a stealthy kill, and when it doesn't respond exactly the way you imagine it would have, it feels wrong. No game is going to be perfect, and the closer you get to that perfection the more the problems with it show. Think about how Neo in the matrix movie responded to the cat. Same type of thing. You notice the faults much more than you notice the details.

Yeah, I've been trying to figure out *what* should be different in these situations...
At a minimum, once there's un-ignorable evidence that something is wrong (one companion dead, or an arrow sticking out of someone's side, for example), they shouldn't be so quick to stop searching and go off alarm...

I just finished the quest that ends at Broken Oar Grotto. The main den where the boss man was, had some 10 or so marauders plus the boss man, all in one place. There was only one way into the complex, along a long ledge that they could easily access. If they had all said "we're being shot at! He *has* to be on that ledge, let's go get him!!", I'd have been in deep trouble!! (I use leather armor, and am easily taken down in melee). Instead, because of this quirk, I just picked off one at a time and slid back just out of sight, and they never confronted me at all! So the encounter ended up being trivial, when it should have been very difficult.

Note that I'm not commenting on my ability to make a stealthy kill, I'm observing the tendency of opponents to ignore environmental evidence such as dead companions, that really should not be ignorable.

(mind you, I'm playing on whatever the "default" difficulty is, not on some hard level, so they might play more sensibly if I turned up the difficulty, which I don't really want to do otherwise).

And yes, I totally agree with Shagsbeard and others - Skyrim is soooo immersive, compelling, varied, beautiful... so superbly done... that little things really do stand out. This is the only issue that I've observed in the game (other than outright graphics bugs which will presumably eventually get fixed) that really stands out as being out of place. It's a very impressive piece of work!