Reddit, I come to you in my time of need

tl;dr game used to run fine (pc), forced 1.2 update from steam, everything broke, uninstall/reinstall, video settings keep reverting to default

Yesterday, November 30th, I started up Steam and noticed that Skyrim just finished downloading and updating. "Swell," I thought to myself, as I had not yet seen the warnings to not download the 1.2 patch. So before I start the game, I decide to check for new mods. I ended up updating a water mod and getting a snowflake mod. Then, I start the game. It loads up, I get to the black menu, the Elder Scrolls symbol is there, but the menu options aren't loading. Exit out, try again. Same thing. Me: WTF. Don't try to fix it. Don't play. Today, December 1st, I come home to try to play, start Skyrim, NOPE, Windows failcrash report. Consistently. Me: WTFx2. Mess around with all my game files in the steam/skyrim folders, still nothing. Uninstall skyrim, reinstall skyrim. Ok, now I start the game with the launcher so I can set up my video settings. I choose ultra, no window mode, 1920x1080. Hit ok. Click play. NOPE. Starts up but in windowed mode. Game runs though. Menu comes up and I can play. Quit. Launcher again. Video settings: Set back to defaults? Me: WTF? Change back to ultra. Hit ok. Look back at video settings: Set back to default. Me: WTFMAN? This is where I'm basically at now. Only except I uninstalled and reinstalled again. Still to no avail. I should add that I think Steam installed 1.2 still, as I had no chance to stop it once the game was done reinstalling. Please help Reddit. I'm suffering from Skyrim withdrawal. Don't make me do something productive instead. Please. Why do my video settings keep reverting back?

EDIT: I fixed it. I guess. All I know is I'm back to pwning dragons. Though I'm rather annoyed that this happened at all. Took me about 5 hours to fix/figure out what was wrong.