A few things:
-A mammoth corpse dropped in on me when I got to a certain mine.
-Not too long after that, I was unable to fast travel. When I did, I got a nice Crash to Desktop.
-Since I couldn't fast travel, I tried just plain old slow travel to get to Markarth and when I get within sight...Crash to Desktop.
So that Wood Elf never quite got the Dragon Scale armor she had been saving up for. Oh well.
So I rolled another character!
A female Nord (I used the default appearance since it was close to my image of a typical Nord woman) Heavy Armor swinging a mace and a dagger in the offhand. NO archery on this one! That's my big handicap. My very favorite thing is a bow in games like this, so for me to go without one is strange feeling indeed. I will be doing some smithing, but nothing too crazy. No enchanting and very little alchemy. And almost no magic. It's unwieldy to use magic with mismatched dual-weapons anyway. So I'll be relying heavily on food and healing potions.
I discovered something very cool. You can have Sven from Riverwood as a companion! I liked Feindal so much, I never thought to do his quest the other way. I'm not giving Sven any armor and only a basic sword. He's basically my Boy Toy pack mule.

I'll be dressing him up in the lastest Bard Fashions as soon as I get some coin...or find some nice threads lying around.
This playthru should be fun. Will be hitting Bleakfalls Barrow soon. I never get tired of the early part of Skyrim. And THAT is what makes Skryim great. Never gets boring.