hammer/vconfig/studiomdl crashing, cant find "steam.dll"

[Carbon14]

Hello, I have run into some serious problems with the source SDK and I simply don't know where to turn. I installed a standalone source engine game a while back, and it caused my studiomdl compiler to stop working (coming up with a fatal exception in both the sdk and the games own tools) I deleted the game in an attempt to fix this, however it just worsened the problem, causing vconfig to complain about a missing steam.dll file on startup rather than simply crashing with a "memory cannot be read" error as it did before. On top of that hammer used to work but now it just performs an "illegal operation" on startup and crashes.

So far I have tried deleting the ".blob" file as was recommended all over the net. I have tried deleting steam and reinstalling it (I deleted it because it wasn't even showing up in my add/remove programs list) and it still didn't work, however after installing it I was able to see it in "add/remove programs" so I "uninstalled" it in the hope that it would clean the steam registry keys out but after reinstalling again its still not working. Formatting is simply not a practical option at the moment but I need this fixed and fast. I don't know where to turn or what to do, it seems steam has some little turd of a registry key hanging around pointing things to the wrong places and I don't know what to do about it.

Hopefully someone has some ideas? (btw all games work flawlessly on maxed settings and 1600x1200 res, its not a GFX or hardware prob I am certain)

 

[skarrob]

Delete hammer and reinstall

 

[Carbon14]

I should have said, when I say deleted steam I mean I deleted it ALL, all the games everything, I copied the content GCF's back for HL2 to check if it worked (shouldn't be errors in the content GCF causing this) and redownloaded the entire source SDK each time. so so far I have deleted hammer and the entire sdk twice =/