Okay, i've had Skyrim since day 1, and didn't have any issues with it until about a month ago.

Now, i'm getting the worlds most irritating audio lag. It comes in two forms that i've noticed so far.

- When swinging/firing a weapon, the game carries on as normal, but the sound effect is delayed, sometimes by so little as to be unnoticeable, but mostly somewhere between 1 - 3 seconds behind the animation.

- Secondly, and far more difficult to deal with, is NPC dialogue. When an NPC is about to talk, either in standard conversations, passing in the street, or grunting/shouting in battle, the game pauses for 1 - 3 seconds before resuming with the sound playing normally. This delay, especially in bigger battles of 3 people or more, has rendered the game absolutely unplayable. Note - the sound does not loop, or in anyway play abnormally. It just causes the whole game to hang whilst it seemingly "loads".

I've attempted any number of fixes, updating my video drivers and changing settings. Previously I ran on high settings without issues, but now this sound lag presents itself on any settings level - i've tried each in turn. I have also attempted:

- Restarting
- Registry cleaning
- Malware/Spyware/Virus scans
- Uninstalling programs/changing startup programs

Also some others, i've been having the problem for a month now and i've lost track of the number of things i've tried. It's worth noting this bug seems to be affecting Deus Ex: HR as well, but other games such as LA Noire and Mirror's Edge are absolutely fine. Despite this i'm not completely writing it off as a possible hardware issue, although Windows Experience Index claims all my statistics, including Hard Disk transfer rate, are unchanged from before the problem occurred. My laptop is under warranty, so i've got no problem if it's a hardware issue, but some kind of idea would be fantastic before I go crazy.

Specs:

Core i7-2630QM @ ~2.00GHz

Nvidia Geforce 540m

8gb of RAM

Windows 7 64-bit

For any other details please ask, i'm not utterly incompetent with computers so I should probably be able to provide something. Either way, any help you can give me would be appreciated so much. Thanks.

you have sound problem, shouldn't you try update the sound driver?

Updated sound driver, re-set audio to 24bit 44100hz, and tested it over several days i'm afraid. Thanks for the help anyway.