been trying to fast travel and walk my way into The Reach (i.e. Markarth) the past couple of days and I always crash to desktop, no error. Any idea what might be the trouble? I can get as close as Rorikstead and a few caves along the road there.

For many reasons this can happen...I had in fallout 3 and NV some bugged saves that no matter how many times I reloaded it, it always crashed. But for laughs I created a new character and ran back to the area where my last character kept crashing , for my suprise the game did NOT crash.

it's not crashing at the save. it's crashing the very second I run over a specific pixelated border. I'll see if some older saves will work fine, but this is strange.

I can get as far as reachcliff secret entrance and then walk a few hundred feet and BAM, back to desktop. I guess I'll reinstall for the fourth time. fun times.

Fourth time o.O
Maybe update your drivers or something. Sometimes these wierd crashes means there's problems with your graphic card or whatnot. Right now it sounds like there is no bugs in your game, your PC just isn't up for the task for some reason.

I just find it weird that it's all around markarth and vicinity. I've been to markarth several times already and recently noticed this when I was just trying to clear out some misc quests. I've updated my Geforce GTS 450 to the 285.62 driver as recommended and set my sound to 16 bit 44.1 khz. admittedly, the nexus mod manager Skyrim HD was probably the reason for a few of my previous reinstalls, but this time I did no mods and it's crashing consistently. we'll see what happens after this downloads again.

You might want to try and take a carriage to markath?

I guess it's a corrupt save. I started a new game and got to Markarth just fine. I loaded an older char and fast travelled to Markarth fine as well. Ouch. Does anyone have tips on weird console commands I can use to try "resetting" in some way?

I would suggest buying a 360 to alleviate this problem.

Id guess its a corrupted graphics file. If you dont find a better solution try backing up your save files and reinstall.

I have the same problem I can go back to real early save and get there, but not not. I did try a reinstall and that didn't work. I even dropped everthing I had to see if it was something I was carrying, but that didn't work. I can fast travel to Reachcliff and Kolskeggr Mine. I then walk towards Markarth and ist always crashed to desktop just befor I get there. SInce I can go back to real early saves and get there, it has to do something with progress in the game and maybe accomplishing something out of order.

What's the size of the save game?

Hah, oh wait, you're serious.

12,111kb - anyone know how to fix a saved file?

see... drop all that money into a computer and what does it do? take a poop on ya.

How mature.

OP, do you know if it's the character save, or if it is your computer? Have you tried travelling a different character through The Reach?

I wonder why it's only crashing around Markath?

If I told you that my PC never has this issue, I assume you'd think I was lying. It's not the fact that he uses a PC. There is a problem and the OP wants to solve it. if the problem with with the PC version, everyone would see the problem whe they play it on PC. Since this is not true, a solution almost certainly exists

Not a bad suggestion

Yeah, platform wars comments are in bad taste. I had a corrupted save on Xbox, but I noticed it straight away and went back a few saves. (It crashed when I tried to open the items menu.) It takes me literally 15 seconds to scroll through my saves.

To me it sounds like some resource like IDK something to do with the Forsworn got glitched. But if you reinstalled and the problem remains then it might be some change you made to the game world, no idea what though. I can't think of any way to fix it since you could never track down what was causing the glitch unless you could dump out a crash report and send it to Beth.