Where did this guy's face go?

Solution 1:

Various anecdotes on the Bethsoft forums* indicate that this is a symptom of a low-memory problem. This seems to be the same problem that causes missing or purple textures, stuttering, and crashes-to-desktop (CTDs).

One solution is to lower your graphics settings to fit into a smaller memory footprint. Another (if you have in excess of 2GB of memory installed) is to enable the Large Address Awareness flag on the TESV.exe executable.

_{* No single good link I can find, just lots of offhand references.}

Solution 2:

I had this problem also, I fixed it by changing the Texture Quality setting from High to Medium.

I can't honestly tell the different, but it's cleared up all the miscellaneous texture issues I was having.