No visual quality, I found that this helped me significantly. I run a heavily modified game, HD tex pack, and tons of other package for visual improvement, and lately I'd been getting CTD's. As a counter to the CTD's I made some ini changes, and it incidentally made my game smoother.
My Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Skyrim.ini
Spoiler
[Papyrus]
bEnableProfiling=0
fUpdateBudgetMS=800
fExtraTaskletBudgetMS=800
fPostLoadUpdateTimeMS=2000
iMinMemoryPageSize=256
iMaxMemoryPageSize=512
iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes=2457600
bEnableLogging=0
bEnableTrace=0
bLoadDebugInformation=0
If you are willing to sacrifice visual quality that you have to look for to see, theres also:
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/15123