I cannot get HL2 or CS:S to start...

[Squeaky745]

First off I have played HL2 and CS:S before, I used to play them all the time, but now they just dont open, here it goes... I open Steam, go to Play games, and click on CS:S/HL2, and it says Preparing to play CS:S/HL2, and then... nothing... nothing happens, and the "hl2.exe" process is still running, and if I try to run it again it says the cannot have two steam processes running at the same time error.

I have tried it with my friends account and that did not work either.

I have also tried updating my drivers to 77.77, and even 71.89 forceware drivers, nothing is working, it just doesn't do anything at all.

I have also removed all of steam/half life 2 from my computer and did a new install of it, that did not work either, I have run out of things to do and now I am asking here, any idea what is wrong?

Computer Specs: AMD 64 3200+ | GeForce 6800 OC 128MB | Gigabyte K8NS Pro | 1 GiG RAM | 120 GB HDD

 

[duffers20]

Try this to validate your hl2 files:

steam://validate/220

And this to validate your cs:s files:

steam://validate/240

Just to make sure its not them, we can hopefully narrow it down more and get your problem sorted.

EDIT: Paste those links into a webbrowser and run them. It will give you a message about running an external application or something.

 

[Squeaky745]

Well those just open up steam and say "validating steam files" and when it gets to 100% it just closes itself...

 

[Stigmata]

Try restarting your computer. Sometimes that's all Steam needs.

 

[Squeaky745]

I have restarted my computer ~20 times with all of the removing/installing drivers, restarting does nothing.

 

[duffers20]

you could try a system restore to a point before it started to not open correctly. Or if you have time, you could always try reinstalling them.

 

[NJspeed]

If you did some recent security upgrades or updates, you may have blocked the port to Steam. That's what happened to me.

 

[Squeaky745]

Well last night I got fed up with it all, so I reformated my computer. They both work now, but now I really don't know if I should update my drivers to 77.77, still on the default drivers that came with my card at the moment.

 

[f0rked]

Yeah I would recommend installing the new drivers. I'd try the ones from here, as I use their ATI ones. Don't know if the same will be true for nVidia cards, but they give a performance increase over the standard drivers for me. Create a system restore point first incase anythin goes wrong though.