Is there a way to permanently disable the orbiting idle camera?

As of right now, without the help of any mods or in-game add-ons, it is not possible to permanently disable the orbiting idle camera. There are 2 other methods, however, that you may find especially useful:

• Toggle the Freefly camera

Simply do so by entering the command TFC into the console. This will switch your camera mode into freefly and "disable" the idle camera.

• Delay when idle will be turned off

Add this to the bottom of skyrim.ini located at (on Windows 7) \Documents\My Games\Skyrim\

[Camera]

; Rotating camera when idle can not be turned off, but delayed.

; 120 seconds is default. Here we go with half an hour:

fAutoVanityModeDelay=1800.0000

Here are a few of the possible and known side effects that have occured when idling while "TFC-ed":

Having an issue though, I was using one of the break dancing animations on my PC and companion- NPC (Lydia). It was a wilderness area at night with snow falling (near a fort). I "TFC'ed" via the console and zoomed it out a good bit then left it idle (had company over). When finally getting back to my computer, I had noticed a few things: my player character had become semi-transparent. This was fixed when I toggled out of TFC command again, however 3 things happened at this point -

1) the forced-3rd person angle was locked in and I still cannot zoom in or out as I would normally with the mouse wheel.

2) there were some bizarre shadow-artifacts flashing at different angles (never had this issue). I reloaded to a previous save and these slowly disappeared when utilizing vanilla animations in-game.

3) and this is a strange one, the loading screen objects became "burned" into fog type effects so that the semi-invisible object was static as it was when the loading screen had finished (keeping its true scale as the actual loading screen).

I really feel this was a conflict with a lighting mod (using latest Realistic Lighting mod - Vision option) and the TFC command.

Source: LINK

The tfc console command works and doesn't have side-effects (except that saving will save the tfc state), but I also found something else. The "Better INI Tweaks for Skyrim" (BITS) mod includes the option to "Disable the auto vanity camera mode". I looked into it and found the corresponding lines:

; Disables the automatic rotating 3rd person camera which activates after your character is idle for
; too long. If AutoVanityMode is enabled, other variables control the delay (in seconds) before
; it activates, the increment of the camera rotation, and the zoom level of the camera.
#bDisableAutoVanityMode=0
#fAutoVanityModeDelay=120
#fAutoVanityIncrement=0.0100
#fDefaultAutoVanityZoom=300
bDisableAutoVanityMode=1

; Install to \Skyrim\Data and the tweaks in this file will override any of the same tweaks from
; the Skyrim.ini file, typically found in C:\Users[USERNAME]\Documents\My Games\Skyrim.
;
; Any line in an INI file that begins with a semicolon [;] or a hashtag [#] is interpreted as a
; comment to be read by humans and is ignored by the game.