Hardly a noob, but I assure you I was only answering your question about the speech skill exploit. Although if youre giving out medals, i'll take one...

strongbad!!
Id be interested to hear if you console users experience any noticeable differences with archery when 1.5 hits.
edit: and im a she
I haven't noticed the "arrow drop" bug yet, I seriously hope that was fixed. TOO many times where I'd be facing an extremely strong adversary and want to dispatch him from a distance... shoot.. BLOP! (Dude turns around and see's me..)
AHH RUN!!
Oh and to the OP: Smith alot of Dwarven crap. You can find bits and pieces of metal to do it easily, AND, Dwarven gets you some pretty nice deniro early game.
EDIT: Snow textures look phenomenal. SOOOO much better than before. Way more detail to them and anti-aliasing. And draw distance has been helped with snow as well, not looking entirely murky/muddy from afar.