Long-time friend o' Blue's ^Drag0n^ sends along his discovery of a solution for a problem causing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to crash with a "Skyrim has stopped working" message. In his case he traced this back to the use of ThreatFire Antivirus. Here's word:

It looks like the PC version of Skyrim is not something that PCTools Threatfire likes. Threatfire causes the game to crash at the launcher when you hit "play" with no message, other than "Skyrim has stopped working."

How did I figure this out? I had a similar problem with CoD: World at War a while back which made me think Threatfire might be the issue.

The easiest way to fix the issue is to just uninstall Threatfire completely.

You can force-quit Threatfire from the process monitor, but you also have to force-quit ALL other ThreatFire/PC Tools modules to make that work (please note that you will have to reboot or open Threatfire from the Start menu to get it running again after doing this):

(1) CTRL + [RIGHT CLICK] Threatfire in the system tray, and select "exit."
(2) In an administrator-level command window, type "net stop threatfire" (without the quotes)

Note: "Suspending" ThreatFire alone from the systray will NOT fix the problem.