Skyrim crashes as soon as I boot up into the menu. How do I fix this?

Whenever I boot up Skyrim, it crashes as soon as it reaches the main menu with no dialog or anything. I thought this was related to my using dual monitors somehow, but I disconnected the other monitor and the game still crashed. I tried running the game in different resolutions, both full-screen and windowed, at various quality settings; no dice. My computer does meet the minimum requirements to play Skyrim.

How do I fix this problem?

Solution 1:

I fixed this issue ultimately by configuring my Sound output device and changing the default format of sound output quality in shared mode. To do this in Windows 7, I went through the following windows:

Control Panel > Sound > (right-click on sound output device(e.g. speakers), properties > Advanced

Here, I changed the Default Format to 24 bit, 48000 Hz (Studio Quality). After changing this and clicking Apply, Skyrim worked fine on the next startup. According to hyper_gateway, you don't have to set the sound quality that low; for example, 24 bits, 96000hz will still work.