when i tried to play skyrim earlier today and after an hour of waiting on skyrim to launch, i decided to re-install the game where it proceeded to validate the game files. After that was complete i hit the play tab on steam this lead to the same problem. Now i uninstall the game and re-install it to no avail. What am i doing wrong or what do i need to do?

There was a problem earlier where you could not launch the game when online with steam. Not sure if it was fix but all I did to have it work was to put steam offline then try to launch that way and it worked.

Yep I had the same problem !!

Going off-line fixes it

This was likely due to their weekly server maintenance. For future reference, should this happen again, you shouldn't have to uninstall. You need only go into offline mode and play from there. If you're ever curious when they do server maintenance, it should be on their main forum page.

This. Today was something of a unique case, though--servers were very wobbly for whatever reason while they did their maintenance work. Either going into offline mode or simply closing Steam and restarting it, even in online mode, fixed the "preparing to launch ad infinitum" issue that's been going on today.

I've had times where Steam wouldn't launch Skyrim. I usually just restart my computer, and that seems to work for me. Or you could try using self-replicating Briar Hearts...

If you don't know what I'm getting at with the replicating Briar Hearts, type "Briar Hearts multiply," "Briar Hearts overencumbered," or something similar in the search bar, and you'll find what I'm talking about.