I have over 120 Hours in Skyrim on PC. I've completed the civil war (stormcloak) and the main quest. I'm now trying to complete the Dark Brotherhood, but anytime I go anywhere near Soltidue to do "Bound Until Death", by walking from a nearby location or fast-travel, the game crashes with a "Skyrim has encountered a problem" in front of a black screen, not a normal crash to desktop that many get randomly. This affects not just Solitude but most of the areas immediately around it. I've tried console coc and cow commands to get there and they all crash the game one way or another. I can go pretty much everywhere else without a problem, but I recently had the same problem with the Wreck of the Winter War. My assumption is more and more regions will get bugged as time goes on.
This bug seems to be associated with large saves/long playthroughs. See similar problems here and here.
Does anyone know of any workarounds?
Best Answer
As this is only affecting certain locations, it's likely that something is corrupt (an NPC, container, door, the list goes on..). This can happen due to a mod, or just by nature (code can be random at times).
Because you saved your game with this error, every time you load your game you are loading the corrupted object again.. and crashing again. I would recommend agent86's suggestion of waiting for cells to respawn. There may also be commands to force a cell to "clean" itself. If this doesn't work, then a mod is probably consistently re-creating the error and you should walk through your modlist and test each one.
Btw, the threads you cited really didn't have anything to do with long playthrough/bloated files. I think it's incorrect to assume that's part of the problem.