Sometimes when I'm playing, the game will suddenly just close to the desktop. It doesn't freeze or crash in a typical way, it looks like like I pressed alt-f4 or something. When the game closes, it shows a quick 3-5 second download happening in steam library. I'm not sure what it's downloading, but it will just show a percentage next to the game title. Anyone else have the same issue? Is there a work-around?

Do you have mods installed? It could be that they are updating.

cliche tiem

Do you have any mods installed?

Yeah I'm running 22 mods atm, I can get rid of some but there are a handful of them that honestly improve the game so much for me I couldn't play without them.

Do you get them from the Steam Workshop?

Try running Skyrim in offline mode. They won't auto update then. Auto updating might be causing this, or conflict with some mods.

Yes

Sorry, I mean't steam in offline mode.

The updates after the game closing as far as I am aware is due to the game updating its save to the steam cloud. Thats normal behaviour, if you disable steam cloud this will no longer happen after the game closes.

The CTD's are a seperate issue though.

Perhaps you could tell us when this happens Ingame?
Also try disabling all your mods to see if it still happens. If it doesn't happen anymore, then your mods are possible conflicting with one another.

It just seems to happen randomly, no specific event or action triggers it. I will try to disable all mods and see if it still happens, but this happens relatively rarely so it will be tough to diagnose the issue.

I suggest getting them from the Skyrim Nexus, the SW versions have a 100mb limit and they've been generally unreliable for me. If turning off Steam Cloud in the properties tab doesn't fix your crashing issue, try it.

I can confirm that this happens with 0 mods loaded.

Disabling mods is not enough. You have to delete them from the data folder, or else the game may still load data from the mods.

I'm aware, I did delete them the only thing I didn't do was unsubscribe from them but they weren't in my "Game Data" folder.