Skyrim freezes at some animations

[The Ranting geek]

So i tried yahoo answers for the last time ever, and now I'm here posting my very first post.

Here is the problem,
I like playing Skyrim alto. The game looks nice when you put some work in it, and with all the mods, it never ends. Unless it decides to freeze to death wile killing your pc in the mean time because it can. So here is what happens:
1: I walk in some dungeon to get the dragon stone with my 2 followers behind me.
2: I encounter my very first doughers ever and start a epic battle.
3: As soon as the second dougher tries to hit me, the game freezes leving me with a nice little view of my last moments before getting killed.
4: I desperately try to kill the processes by slamming the hotkey to a bat program with taskkill.exe in it after alt tabbing out of the game. tho the frozen screen stays frozen on the top layer so i cannot use my main screen.
5: The game decides to work after 30 seconds, and forces me back into it, only to freeze again after less than a blink of an eye.
6: The game keeps frozen and as an attempt to reset the game to be behind the taskbar, i ctrl-alt-del and press cancel.
7: The game froces me back again repeatedly and freezes my computer completely while doing it.
8: TESV.exe cannot be killed no meter how hard i try and keeps running if i, what rarely happens, manage to log-off and login again.
9: i try to shutdown, and the pc get into the Shutting down loop.
10: I rage a bit and then turn off the power switch for 10 seconds to calm down a bit and reboot the pc.
11: I look on tons of forms for some hours and try the whole thing again.

Now THIS is very frustrating. So i have tried monitoring the whole thing and this is what i found out:

In GPU-z the GPU stays at 300Mhz, probably for power reasons, but when the game freezes, it stays 300, and as soon as it unfreezes, it turns to 100% usage for some 2 seconds. So it should turn up the Hrz to 900, but wont do that fore some reason. Also i took a look at the memory usage (VRAM) and found that it keeps around 980MB (i have 1GB) and then when it freezes, stays around 600MB.
The CPU-Load is always about 5% to max of 20%, so thats not the problem. The memory (RAM) stays around 60/70%, so that cannot be the course either. And the GPU's Virtual memory just uses about 60MB. Nothing is overheating, and swap is mostly left alone. Also its getting plenty of Voltage, it almost always has about 10% left.

The freezing begins when a dougher (zombie skeleton) looks at me, and attacks me. It also appears to happen when my companion is hit by a trap (Where a door with spikes hits her). after this she is badly wounded and crouching. So it looks like it happens when i take damage or someone else does. If i stay in-game, the freeze takes about 1 minute to 3 minutes. After that the GPU will stay at 300Hrz and the memory at 600MB.

The game worked fine before i reinstalled windows 7 64bit, and the game is on my secondary drive. So basically everything is exactly the same, except for my desktop background 😛

you probly need some specs so here they are:

Video: AMD Radon HD6870
Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T (overclocked from 2.8Ghrz to 3.2Ghrz)
Motherboard: Asus m4a89gtd pro/usb3
Memory: 4GB DDR3 1600Mhz
PSU: 450W
3 HDD's total 650 GB
1 SSD with 60GB for OS and 50GB for games

I use HDMI to my TV (Full HD 60hz) and a DVI to my second screen (about 720P)
The game is located at my HDD, and the Save Files (The my games folder) on another one.
I use Razer Surround, and Razer Game Booster. Also i use ASC for more RAM.

I haven't even touched the game since re-installation until 2 weeks ago. This is very annoying since i use it for my game-plays.

 

[CrispyChips]

To start,download Speccy to monitor all of your temps.

What you want is to find the highest temperatures your PC(CPU and GPU) reaches while gaming. If heat is not an issue then we'll work on your 300Mhz Core Clock(PowerTunes fault).

 

[The Ranting geek]

To start,download Speccy to monitor all of your temps.

What you want is to find the highest temperatures your PC(CPU and GPU) reaches while gaming. If heat is not an issue then we'll work on your 300Mhz Core Clock(PowerTunes fault).

So i have done what you told me, and no temperatures go unusual. My AMD Graphic card has a max of 75°C before it starts turning up the fan. so it never gets above that. The lag to freeze issue seems to fade away slowly and i have narrowed it down a bit more. When i was testing a bit more, i found that after running my PC for a while and then running the game, it has no lag at all. Even on parts where it should have lag (?). So this is what i saw:

There is just one Dougher who is freezes my screen, and it only happens when he looks at me. So i don't know if it is an error in the game, but till now he has been the one I've looked at all the times it froze. it may be so that he also causes the freeze if he attacks me. But still that wold not explain why the game freezes when my follower gets hurt. I will do some more testing if it may be the dieing animation, or if i kill the Dougher with commands first, i can play the game. Also i will test if it may be the glowing eyes that take to much processing power. (unlikely, but with my rig and luck you never know)

At time of riding this, the game is still running on the background because i successfully alt-tabbed out and used the bat's hotkey in time. This is what is happening now:

All programs i use, tend to freeze if i use one of the standard windows buttons. Loading times are increased massively, and saving/creating files, gathering system information, or any of that, will freeze the application. apps that use a little to much GPU power, will freeze to. The process manager from ASC (Monitor.exe) freezes about every 3 seconds for 3 seconds in a loop. I have no problems writing this in case that was useful information. it looks like all programs that start or stop do freeze.

Thats all info i have for now. I will try some more tests to see if this is a game bug or a hardware bug. i will post the results after that.

UPDATE: So i tried to watch a Youtube video without rebooting first, and when i saw how well it played, i thought that TESV.exe may had stopped by itself. And i was right. So it freezes the computer for a long time but after about 30 minutes, it eds the task anyway. I hope all the information starts making more sense now :$ cold it be a bug of windows? also i still cannot find a process "Handle" thats preventing it from shutting down. I have looked for the SKSE.bat which modifies Skyrim before launching so mods work. But its a bat so unlikely to be running and preventing the task to end. Hope this helps.

 

[The Ranting geek]

So it has been some days now and its time for an update:

I have reinstalled windows and put back a Image from 2 months ago. I also now know to never use the Windows imaging program again -_-
So here is what i found out: My Drive D has probably caused the freeze cause of corrupted files. I noticed this when i had gotten my image back via Ghost32, and my D drive made my Explorer.exe crash whenever i opened a file stored on it. (It has all the downloaded files on it for in case.... i had to reinstall windows..............).
For instance, i have a driver stored on the drive, and when i click it, it takes about a minute to respond and load, then when extracting, it does it on about 2kb/ps (wild guess). So since the game was stored there to, it may caused the game to freeze whenever it had to read a sound file from the disk, for when something else than the main char (Douger) it had to load it first before the game could continue.
So now i know it ain't a RAM or heat problem but a corrupted file problem. Since i can still open up some files (the ones that have there icons loaded) that way i have still installed several things, but that means that the disk is not corrupted, but just has a error in its index or something.
The problem is, i cannot backup the drive without it killing my computer. and i really don't want to lose all my downloads, games, gameplay, My friends gameplay, and all that good stuff!

I know there is a way to read the files and scan for the broken ones, but i have no idea how. I can make a system image with Ghost again, but wold that fix the drive? Since it just clones it and doesn't Backup the drive. Wold that just bring the problems back when i put the Image on it after a Format?

- the Ranting Geek