Why is my game constantly crashing silently to desktop with no error message?

Maybe your computer or graphics card is getting too hot. Check how long you can run Skyrim until it crashes.

Also, check this out -> FIX for CTDs and Missing Textures I heard it does a very good job of preventing CTDs.

And save often!

I had the same problem that you. I've an ASUS GTS450 for video card, and at some point after enter and reenter from cities and buildings, it's become to loose image mapping (for example, a texture is just a empty violet or yellow color). This is happens in any condition and/or video configuration, low or ultra.

After a research I think it's a memory leak, I think the garbage video doesn't work as expected so it's an acumulation of a lot of things (not bugs), just a sample overflow.

Working with 8GB and the following patch that converts the max use of 2GB to 4GB for memory game use, doesn't solve at all the problem but it's a refresh because right now, my game doesn't crash often, just one time every two days.

Patch: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=3211

Personally, I put about 18 hours into skyrim before it really started acting up. After that, it would just crash to desktop every 5-30 minutes, and/or I would get this glitch where a great deal of the landscape and enemies would turn a violet colour. The first fix I found was the sound tweak, which of course did nothing, but was probably worth doing anyway. Next, I found out I had the ORIGINAL version of skyrim - Not a single patch or upgrade installed. So I D/L'd the latest official patch, which also didn't seem to help much by itself, but combined with the unofficial patch and the bscedit trick from this link http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=3211, it hasn't crashed in days!! Probably also worth mentioning that I'm not running any mods or dlc's. The only thing now is that after many hours of consecutive playing, the game fouls up anyway, like the mouse cursor won't ever leave the screen, enemies become invisible, etc. But no more crashing! I can report 100% effectiveness in my case for the above mentioned fixes. I am running a Toshiba laptop with 8GB of RAM, and 700GB of harddrive, but only a single core processor, so it kind of evens out with a lower grade of laptop. (Don't be fooled by WalMart sales!!!). Running with high graphics settings.

Thanks for all the help!