If you don't have my documents/my games/skyrim where tge saves and three settings files should be then something is seriously wrong. Likely a permissions problem.

Oh and for testing you can copy the skyrim install folder around and directly launch tesv.exe, you don't need to modify Steam as Skyrim will happily run without Steam.

Okay. I think I got it. I have no idea why this happened.

It looks to me like for some reason the "owner" of the "My Games" folder was not open to me (I'm the only 'administrator' user on the system (there is another account set up for my kids with all sorts of filters, etc.). I found this out when I tried to manually put a skyrimprefs.ini file from the Steamaps folder into the Skyrim folder I manually made in "my games." It let me do this, but when I went to edit the copied file in my games, which went fine, and then save it, it refused to let me. I thus googled the permission/owner thing and came up with something else to try.

Yet another reason why I should (wifey!!) have a dedicated rig for ME and they can have their Facebook, Poptropica, Webkins and miscellaneous garbage machine.

Anyway, my guess is the software wasn't being allowed to put items in the 'my games' location. I got down to this after moving Steam to my unused D drive, which still didn't help (but did take a long time).

Then I was about to erase the whole thing and impose said "you will now have your own computer for what you do and we'll buy it at Costco and you won't touch mine" rule when I figured out I should check ownership of those folders.

I haven' had issues with other games, but maybe they put their stuff in their own spot.

Anyway, it seems to work.

Does anyone know what would cause folders I started with having full access to all of a sudden restricted??

Here is the link I used to figure this out in case anyone else has this problem of "ownership."

http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/windows-7-access-denied-permission-ownership/

I'm going to cut and past this to the Bethesda forums.

I swear, pc gaming is a young man's game (or else someone with lots more free time than I have...!).

Welcome back to Tamriel...

And if you ever need to reinstall/move Steam like he was doing, you can take the steamapps folder (from your Steam directory) and copy it to a safe location. Then after reinstalling Steam copy the folder back into the new Steam directory, start Steam and ask it to "verify local game cache" for the games that you had installed before.