The bandits east of Whiterun ask for 200g. I choose to battle them, but I died. Upon loading my latest save, the bandit lady is not by the path anymore, bugging the "radiant story" she was supposed to present by charging me money for her toll road.

I've done this on both the 360 and on a ps3 rental of the game. I bought a 360 copy after I rented the ps3 copy.

So, go talk to a bandit east if whiterun by that narrow, tall bridge. Die. Load a recent save. Return to that same spot. See the bugged AI results. She's gone, and if you waste a lot of time, you may get a message from her or just get outright attacked.

Going to the XBOX Dashboard and then restarting the game fixes the issue.

Those enchounters are randon events and usually if you reload it changes. I did this many times in Fallout 3. Reloading changes the randon AI scripting. It is not a bug. IMO seems like alot of people are trying to literally find fault with the game. Just to have something to post. Maybe not everyone. But I have noticed alot of posts that people claim as bugs and turn out not to be.

It does not sound like a bug to me. It appears to be a random event. You had your one chance to see it through, and you died.

Hmm. It could be a bug.

Agree that is a random event which doesn't need to be there on a reload but I noticed something else on that encounter. If I choose to talk her out of it (not giving money) the game still shows the message that 200 gold were removed. Didn't actually checked my money but the message was always there.

No, I saved my game about 45 seconds away from the encounter. I remembered the encounter from the game rental, so I saved beforehand. WHen I died, I reloaded, ran, and observed the absence of the person. When I went into the door of their bridge structuer, the bandit captain came all the way from the other side of the bridge to fight me.

It's a toll road. That girl is supposed to demand that I pay her 200g.

It may be a random encounter, but how could I be so close to the "event" on my save file and have different results upon loading?

If it was so random, how come when I went to the dashboard and back, the encounter happened again in the way that I expected it to?