After several crash-to-desktop experiences and unsuccessful "verify integrity of game cache" attempts, I completely reinstalled the game. I played for about 4 hours and got crashes again. Now I've verified four times in a row without playing or anything else in between and each time it's found 1 to 3 corrupt files and has to download new ones (for an hour or two each time).

Please suggest something besides completely reinstalling or verifying the game cache.

Notes:
1) All my drivers are up to date. Did that first thing.
2) I'm playing without any mods. Just the vanilla game.

Yeah, I don't even know what that verify thing should do but I had the same experience. Steam told me 1 file was corrupt. Didn't say which one.

Hi,
First try a Defrag......

Doesn't help......Run scandisk Check if your HDD is failing.

It is the INI file.Especially if you made any changes to it.Hope that helps.

this is a steam issue - not a HD one

once you have done it twice, i would not have tried doing it againg straight away a third time

try restarting your computer, Steam / Skyrim seems to like a reboot & fresh RAM

I've just started running into this myself. It's a fairly new issue, I believe since 1.3 came out, but might also have to do with any mods you have installed. I haven't yet tried uninstalling all my mods and seeing what happens (would have to start a new game to do it). Do you have any mods installed?

It's definitely not a defrag or physical HDD issue, of that I'm sure. I also tried doing a complete reinstall as you did to no avail.

Might just need to report this one via a support ticket.

I believe you are right. A number of settings had reset to default after Steam fixed the supposedly "corrupt" file.