Ive been playing skyrim for quite some time now (like a year), and I havent had any problems before. I haven't played skyrim for maybe 3-4 weeks before today, and I decided to play it today.

I loaded the game, and loaded my most recent save game and started playing. Everything was fine until about 30-45 minutes in, I started to realize that tree shadows were beginning to screw up, and the shadows were HUGE, it was shadowing like the whole area I was in, and was definitely a tree shadow as there were small gaps in the shadow, and only occurred when I came close to a tree. I ignored the shadow bug, as it wasn't really affecting anything major. I alt tabbed out, and back in a couple of times over a period of time, and it went away. Then, I did a quick save, and exited the game. I reloaded the game a couple minutes later and hit "Continue" and the game just crashes anytime I try to load a game. I will hit Continue or Load and it will go the load screen, then right when it's about to enter the game, it just crashes to the desktop.

Any ideas?

Specs:
Windows 7
AMD Athlon II x4 640
EVGA Geforce Gtx 560 ti 1 GB
8 GB DDR3 RAM 1333MHz
1 TB HDD

I just remembered when I was playing, the reflections on the water were glitching too, so i turned off reflect everything on water, and I got it to load... Idk why it started to glitch all of a sudden...

I had the same issue, mine crashed during the load screen anytime i tried to fast travel with any high system resource requirement mod on my alienware. The rotating object thing in load screens (whichever it may be at the time)was freaking out 2. Just uninstalled and reinstalled and runs fine on high res setting again.