Have had it running fine for about 8 weeks, with only 1 crash since I installed it that I can remember, and none of this has changed:

-No mods other than "FOV 75" in the console sometimes,
-set to auto-patch from steam.
-102 hours played
-650 save games
- reinstalled it once when I formatted my OS hard drive, it found my save games on a data drive fine
-1 character
-Ultra quality @2560x1600
-nVidia GTX 580 w/ 285.62 whql driver not overclocked on
-Win7 Home Premium SP1 64 bit,
-16GB RAM, SSD for game and OS with plenty of space, HDD for save games with plenty of space,
-Intel i72600K mildly overclocked,
-Creative Soundblaster XFI HD w/ ctaud2k.sys 6.00.0300.1004 driver, stereo speakers



Starting in the last 2-3 days it has been crashing at least once an hour, sometimes within a few minutes of starting a session.
- always and only when transitioning and loading a new area/map, such as when exiting a shop or the Mage's College
- sometimes stopping at a black screen
- sometimes stopping just as the screen draws and it still says "Saving..." at top left
- never recovers if I just wait or try pressing keys or buttons
- does not seem to be running behind the frozen screen as keypresses do not result in the expected game sounds
- no visible error message
- usually still playing sound, but no mouse control within the game
- so far ALT+TAB and CTRL+ESC will not get me out of the game one crashed like this
- usually CTRL+ALT+DEL will allow me to bring up Task Manager which shows the game as Not Responding
- so far killing it and starting up the game again brings me up at the point where it crashed

What I have tried:
- verified game cache (fine)
- ran dxDiag (It reports "No problems found" on all tabs)
- turning off auto-save
- changing from Ultra to High Quality
- updating to the new 295.73 nVidia driver
- rebooting
- closing all other running apps (empty task manager)
- Win7 disk check (no problems found)
- Windows update
- turning off Steam cloud sync
- moving about 500 of my 650 save games to another folder (game save/load is faster, but still crashes)

What I have not yet tried, but plan to:
- reinstalling into a new folder
- going back to a really old save game (which would svck)
- playing windowed 1080p instead of 2560x1600 (which would svck)
- trying to find the old patch (which seems to be unavailable except through unsafe channels)
- waiting until the next patch (which would svck)

Since this seems to be around the time of the last patch, I expect that's it, but I'm surprised nobody else has reported similar issues in this timeframe. There are lots of older threads about random crashes or crashes on map load or auto-save, but nothing I saw where somebody had it working fine for a long time and it suddenly started falling over frequently either around 100 hours or over the past week (at least not on the PC).

Move the large majority of yours saves to another folder and see if that fixes it.

It is a known issue that too many saves can cause slow downs and crashes

I have it down to 50 saves, the first 10 and the last 40, and it still does it.

Same issue. After 1.4.27 the game began to crash every now and then. I've removed all saves except the last one. Still it freezes often. Untill now I've only had few crashes near Riverwood at early game. Now it's unplayable at all
I'll try the new character to learn if this trouble occurs because of my 100+ hours save or not.

Are you using any mods ? I was crashing often until I removed the high-res texture pack. Looks like the latest patch possibly removed LAA.

No mods.

Tried starting a new character and played about 2 hours with no crashes.

Not sure if that means I got lucky, my recent saves are hosed and I need to go back 10 hours or so when the crashing started, or if it will just always start to die for me around 100 hours in.

Started new character yesterday. No crashes at all. Looks like smth went wrong with my main's saves

Oh thank God, I was starting to think I was crazy or that I was the only one this has been happening to. After around 100 hours of playtime, to suddenly start having freezes... arg!

I have a very similar situation, although some slight additional information:

-different system specs:
Geforce GTX 560 Ti with driver 295.73 (the updated one that was supposed to help Skyrim). I see you are using the 285 drivers, so I will go ahead and assume the driver update didn't cause this (IIRC, the driver update was a few days before Skyrim 1.4.27 hit Steam, and this problem started shortly after the Skyrim patch).
-only 8gb RAM
-SSD for OS and fast platter for games, just like you... if this somehow ties in to an SSD-related issue, I am going to cry
-Core i5 2500K, not overclocked at all.
-Win7 ultimate x64

-mods:
-I use SkyUI and the required Skyrim Script Extender. After 1.4.27, I updated SKSE of course. Once I started running into this problem I tried going back to the default UI without SKSE, but the problem still occured, so I don't believe SKSE to be the cause.
-I also have the official high-resolution texture pack

save games:
-I have only ever had 11 save games that I save over in a cycle, plus the 3 autosaves and the quicksave. So no, I don't think it is the number of savegames.


** SYMPTOMS (expanded from original poster) **
- Skyrim freezes *usually* occur when fast-travelling or going through a door that loads a new area (indoor or outdoor: have frozen entering Breezehome, Whiterun, leaving Septimus's shack, and innumerable other places). These seem to match up with what you described, and generally occur immediately after an autosave, so no progress is lost: just ctrl+alt+del, kill the process, relaunch, life is back...
- It *also* freezes when just running around outdoors. I've even reloaded my game and run the same path and it has frozen in the same spot again, so I suspect it is the point at which either new terrain cells are being loaded or old ones are being flushed, though I'm not sure. Because of this, I've taken to mashing Quicksave whenever I've gone more than about 2 minutes since my last save, no matter what I'm doing. It doesn't *always* freeze though, sometimes I can reload a save and run roughly the same path and it will let me through.
---- note: I have yet to see it freeze on an indoor area (dungeon), except immediately after entering. Once inside, exploring the entire dungeon seems to never freeze, unless I load a new dungeon area.


Thoughts:
- seems definitely related to loading. I do wonder if perhaps a previous poster was correct, and the latest patch broke the Large Address Awareness? One thing I have noticed is that whenever I go to kill the process, TESV.exe is using between 1.1gb and 1.6gb of RAM. ... unfortunately I have no comparison data points from before 1.4.27, because it never crashed, so I never had a reason to look at Task Manager while it was running ... was it previously able to use more than 2GB?


Things I will try:
- disabling the official high res texture DLC even though this will make me sad, since I've never seen Skyrim without it (having bought the game mere hours before that DLC was released... yep, I missed the Steam sale by 6 hours so I paid full price).

I have been doing nothing but working on my mod for the last few weeks and when I started playing again just a bit ago, I was not able to play at all without crashing. I disabled the 2 high res packs also and the crashing has stopped. Guess I will leave them off until I can find a solution.

Well, this worked. The game is subtly less beautiful, seeming more blurry/dirty but at least I managed to play for a couple hours without a single crash. Prior to 1.4.27, the game ran fine with that high res texture DLC though, so I have hopes that they can un-break whatever they broke [LAA?] and then I can use it again.

I came here for answers to the same exact problems since the 1.4.27 patch. I have been playing this for weeks and weeks and it has never had one crash or glitch. Now today, 4 March, it has crashed HARD twice. I had to do a cold reboot in order to get back to the desktop.

I wonder if it's related to the latest patch. Doesn't Bethesda beta these patches?

I was just troubleshooting. Here's what I did:

It crahsed twice when talking to Aelea in the Companion hall.
It happened twice in a row when I rebooted from the hard crash and chose continue.
So I deselected the texture packs and restarted the game, hit continue and spoke with her and no crash.

So I think it may be patch related with the texture packs. Hope they read these posts and are aware of this.

Glad I found this thread. I have been going batty trying to isolate mods and seeing if any of them is causing my crashes. I don't use that many, maybe ten or so, and I mostly have ones that change the look of things, as well as better sorting and the categorized favorites menu.

It was crashing intermittently when loading new areas... but this was happening maybe 1 in 10 times, and it wouldn't be predictable where. So far, turning off the official HD texture packs seems to have fixed it. Before patch 1.4.27, I had no problems at all using the official texture pack. I have an i5 2500k, 1 GB AMD 6870, with 16GB of ram, and the system is rock-steady otherwise. SOOO, I'm guessing they screwed up something in the patch.

Started a 3rd character, and have played through about 12 hours with no crashes, and I haven't reinstalled or done anything else. Looks like either my saves were corrupted or something breaks at over 100 or so hours with the patch.

Could be some kind of memory related thing that doesn't trigger until certain conditions are met AS WELL AS having the HD texture packs on. This is just speculation on my part. All I know is that I haven't crashed yet over a few sessions now after I disabled the official HD textures packs, so there's definitely something going on with the latest patch and its interaction with the pack. I'm glad I can still play, but really, Bethesda have to learn how to fix their shizz. I just hope that they know this is an issue.

I had this kind of "long term play crash" as well. Then I went completely vanilla. That seemed to work. But after last patch suddenly I could not get into Windhelm without CTD. The solution was simply to reinstall the game. I have now installed the latest SKSE + SkyUI and things seem fine. I do get the occasional crash, but it's very rare compared to before.

At least the loading crashes (hangs during loading) don't happen anymore. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that I disabled auto saving on travel and loading.

I do think there is a problem with long term play and that Beth should look into this.

Reinstalling does wonders...I seem to need one to solve something after each patch.