Help with Steam, please?

[themono]

Hi - I'm new to this forum, I joined as I figured someone here might know how to fix my steam issue.

I bought the Orange Box, my first ever steam-requiring game on its release.

It ran beautifully for a while, Steam annoyed me a bit, but it worked.

The most recent Steam update simply doesn't work though. It updates through to 28%, restarts itself, downloads for a little longer, then resets back to 0%, jumps to 28%, does this loop a few times, then silently crashes. Net result: I can't play any of the Orange Box. Valve support have been less than helpful, and after I reported the problem on the 15th they still haven't provided any sort of comment that implies they have read the problem.

I've tried every little tip and trick I can find to get steam going, but nothing works. I have:

Removed my router and connected direct to the net.
Disabled my firewall.
Uninstalled Steam
Reinstalled Steam
Uninstalled and removed any registry keys
Reinstalled
Allowed it to loop till it crashed many, many times.

Nothing works, and it is frustrating the hell out of me. Anyone have any ideas? Is it possible to update steam from a download? A zip file or something? Or to launch Steam games without launching Steam first? Any tips would be fantastic.

Thanks a lot.

 

[joule]

Have you tried deleting the ClientRegistry.blob file in your Steam folder?

 

[themono]

Thanks for the quick reply - you're beating Valve support already

Yes, I have done that. Following another suggestion, I deleted everything except Steam.exe and the SteamApps folder, and neither of these solved the issue either.

 

[joule]

What are you specs?

Nothing works, and it is frustrating the hell out of me. Anyone have any ideas? Is it possible to update steam from a download? A zip file or something? Or to launch Steam games without launching Steam first? Any tips would be fantastic.

No. To see if your Steam client requires any updates just open up Steam, go to File->Check for Steam client updates...

 

[themono]

Finally solved the problem by avoiding the problem. I found on a 'less than reputable' forum which was dedicated to cracking Steam that somebody had uploaded the latest version of Steam - uncracked. I downloaded that, and started Steam. Because it was already updated, it didn't need to go through the updates. I logged on to my account, it picked up my games, and worked perfect. It was just the updating that was broken.

Now why couldn't Valve have avoided all this in the first place...

Edit: with regard to my specs, it's a core2duo with 3gb ram and a 7600GS. It was running the games fine to start with, it was just the update that broke everything.

 

[joule]

Finally solved the problem by avoiding the problem. I found on a 'less than reputable' forum which was dedicated to cracking Steam that somebody had uploaded the latest version of Steam - uncracked. I downloaded that, and started Steam. Because it was already updated, it didn't need to go through the updates. I logged on to my account, it picked up my games, and worked perfect. It was just the updating that was broken.



Edit: with regard to my specs, it's a core2duo with 3gb ram and a 7600GS. It was running the games fine to start with, it was just the update that broke everything.

Yeah, don't do that. That's very, very bad.

Now why couldn't Valve have avoided all this in the first place...

Why couldn't YOU have avoided all this in the first place?

http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=getsteamnow

 

[themono]

Why couldn't YOU have avoided all this in the first place?
http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=getsteamnow

Well, if you really want to get snarky, I'm happy to explain.

The Steam update requires you to download many of the files again, correct?

Now, that file which you linked to (which, incidentally, I did download and use several times) is simply a packup of Steam.exe, not all the other files needed to run Steam, so that once you install it, it goes through and updates itself to download all those other files.

As my original problem is with that updating stage, it doesn't help at all.

When I said that Valve could have avoided this in the first place, what I meant is by offering exactly what you seem to think they are offering - a complete Steam download. Unfortunately they do not.


EDIT: And yes, I know what I did is far less than ideal. The idea is from this thread - http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=622489 - on the Steam forums where several users who seem to have the same problem have reported that downloading Steam on another computer and simply copying over the files worked a treat. To clarify, all I downloaded was what you would get if you installed Steam on a computer and let it update, but did not connect to an account or have any games.