Is there anything I can do about loading hangs?

[Synthesis]

For as long as I've owned Skyrim, with or without mods, I've seen the same bug: for some reasons, often appearing totally random, I'll be stuck with a loading screen that never ends.

 

The lovely map or chair or whatever will simply float in front of me indefinitely--until I get impatient and bring up the task manager (and I've waited 20 minutes in the past). It happens most often when I'm transferring into the outdoor world, but is not limited to it. And it frequently seems arbitrary: last night, for example, I transferred from Red Eagle Redoubt to the outside world via a complex portal, a so-called "door", with zero problems. When I did the same today, loading earlier--unending loading screens.

 

To elaborate, the loading screen never freezes--in fact, pauses and skips usually indicate that some loading is happening. No message comes up. It just keeps....loading. Is there anything at all I can do about this? I can say very confidently Skyrim is one of the buggiest games I've ever played, even before modding. I also don't own any DLC, for what it's worth, nor did I install any mods between the time this started, and am playing this off a Crucial M4 SSD. Is there anything I can do to avoid this in the future?

[Synthesis]

Another effort:

 

I've noticed a slight variation of this issue: I'm in the western half of the continent, doing Markath quests for the first time in this save.

 

If I save in the world, quit out, and load the save, the loading screen will continue indefinitely.

 

If I load an earlier indoor save and walk outside, I can get to the outside. Not only that, if I do that, and then load my outdoor save, I can load them.

 

Anyone have any idea what might cause this? I've installed no mods that would possibly have an effect on that. It just seems like the game is just really poorly written when it comes to loading from "zero" as oppose to "ten".

[jaime74]

I am facing similar problems with endless loading screens: About every 20th time I load up a savegame, it ends up in a neverending loading screen sequence. Whenever this is the case, hard disk activity always goes down to nearly zero, so it seems that the game is doing nothing at all, it just hangs in some kind of loop.

 

Here's one thing I noticed: I am playing with two different characters, and I try to keep both savegames up to date.

Most times when one of those games comes up with the loading screen issue, I can still load the other one, and vice versa. When I start the game from scratch and load the working savegame first, and then the problematic one, it works fine! However, if I try to load up the problematic savegame first, it won't work (i.e. loading screen hangs up).

It looks to me like there is some initialization going on in the background, that takes place only once per game session, independently of which savegame I am trying to load.

 

Anyone else experiencing this?

 

BTW, I must admit that I am having tons of mods installed. I wager that I did not have these problems earlier, with less mods installed, so there's a chance of course that running through the usual process (disable mods one by one) would most certainly reveal some clue before long. But at the same time, it seems to me that these issues did not start before updating to game version 1.8, so it might as well be a new incompatibility introduced only by that latest patch. As the disable-one-by-one procedure is very tedious (especially if there's a Bashed Patch involved), I'd be happy if I could track this down a bit better without that beforehand.

[jaime74]

A little bump/update:

Seems that other are having these issues as well. See here: http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/941621-again-and-again-freezes/page-2&do=findComment&comment=7603805