Steam is being a dick

[Jintor]

Steam's updating the Steam platform, which is all well and good, if painful on 128kb/s.

All well and good.

But unfortunately, when it finishes updating, it closes. No error messages, nothing. And then when I start Steam again, it starts updating again.

So this has happened three times already, and it's getting annoying. It takes long enough to play Episode Two as it is without all this ****ing downloading going on...

 

[Laivasse]

Are you absolutely sure it closes? Is Steam.exe gone from task manager? I've had occasions where Steam, when updating slowly, will vanish completely for up to a couple of minutes while it's doing its thing. It then reappears all fresh and updated.

If you do spot some stray instances of Steam lurking in the task list, shut them all down, start it up and just wait...go and make a cuppa and see what happens.

If not, then maybe deleting clientregistry.blob and restarting it would work.

 

[Jintor]

I found the problem again... it's the god-damned dbghelp.dll file again, apparently non-existant or something. At the end of updating Steam tells me it's found some sort of error with the dbghelp.dll file and then closes.

Any clues with this? Last time this happened I had to redownload Steam and all my games on it, too. That took ****ing ages.

 

[Laivasse]

I'm out of ideas :s Never heard of it or had it happen to me. Is there no Steampowered support item for it?

If in the past it has meant that your whole Steam install is screwed, then maybe you'd have nothing to lose if you just got someone to send you the dll?

 

[Jintor]

I deleted the ClientRegistry.blob and now it's even worse, it can't even connect to Steam, it doesn't even try - about 4 seconds of 'Updating: 0%' and then 'Steam is temporarily unavailible; please try again later'

I'm starting to see why people hate Steam so much. When it works, it works. When it ****s up, nobody ever has any ****ing clue what's going on with the stupid thing.

 

[Laivasse]

That sounds bizarre. Deleting that should just force Steam to update to it's latest version. Try rebooting just for shits...? Could you be having network problems?

 

[Jintor]

I tried rebooting, no help.

This is ****ed up. I might do what I did last time and copy/pasta my Steamapps folder and reinstall Steam.

EXCEPT THAT ****ING TOOK 3 HOURS LAST TIME AND THAT WAS WITHOUT THE ORANGE BOX

Jesus, I can't even force Offline mode, what the **** is wrong with this?

This only happened when the Steam platform updated just then... it updated to 100%, but then screwed up with the DBGHelp.dll thing.

 

[Laivasse]

Since the problem seems to be your steam install rather than any of your games, maybe there would be an easier way involving you replacing just the files from someone else's steam folder (basically copying their install). I don't know exactly what files are necessary for this however.

Edit: From looking at it, I'd say it would be worth replacing every file in your Steam folder (except ClientRegistry.blob or any other blob) with someone else's, along with the 'bin' and 'resource' folders just to be safe. Zipped up this is like 6Mb, so it's far preferable to redownloading all your games. It would also be worth trying to replace just DBGHelp.dll first to see if it helps. I have no idea if any of this would work, however, and if it screwed up you'd be left with little option but to start from scratch. Having said that, if it's a problem with your Steam install i can't see how it wouldn't work either.

I'm vaguely sure that this measure would involve no transfer of sensitive user-specific data, although someone please hurry along and correct me quickly if I'm wrong.

 

[Jintor]

I'm sure there's a good reason for Steam crashing when it updates itself. :/

 

[Acepilotf14]

lul, Jintor, looks like you may ahfta reinstall.

 

[soulslicer]

that steamy dick got owned. reinstall it. you have no choice

 

[Jintor]

Retarded! I reinstalled it, it asked to update, so I let it, then restarted Steam and DBGHELP.DLL CRASHED IT AGAIN!

ARGH!

If anybody with the latest Steam platform update would like to send me dbghelp.dll that'd be cool, I want to try replacing the file in my Steam folder with that because I've tried deleting it and Steam just makes another one and screws it up.

It's definately dbghelp.dll that's causing this, but I can't see the Error Number because the Steam Window stupidly cuts it off.

 

[Jintor]

I replaced dbghelp.dll with somebody else's, and that didn't work. :/

 

[Rapstah]

Excuse the crappy uploading site, this forum doesn't allow zips larger than 100 KBs.

http://www.badongo.com/file/-1311496519

EDIT: Oh damn you Jintor, try picking your moments

And you have tried deleting everything in the Steam folder except for Steam.exe and the Steamapps folder?

 

[Jintor]

I reinstalled Steam from the msi installer on the steampowered sight and I think it worked. Just putting the games in...

I hope this doesn't happen every time Steam updates. :/

 

[Jintor]

It happened again! Steam updated and I can't write to Dbghelp.dll, so Steam crashes!

****!

 

[Asus]

Have an issue with some Anti Virus or something perhaps?

 

[Laivasse]

I can .rar up everything I think you'd need for you to replace your basic steam install, at about 7.5Mb. Want me to do that and upload it somewhere, or is reinstalling from the Steam site better for you?

 

[Jintor]

It was working fine with ZoneAlarm up until like 4 weeks ago, when the errors began - but I've disabled ZoneAlarm before and nothing happened. I don't have an Antivirus installed anymore... should probably remedy that. :/

Laiv, would I still have to copy/pasta my Steamapps folder out and back in after resinstall? That's the bit that's taking the most time atm.

 

[Laivasse]

I'm betting that you could just overwrite some of the files in the Steam folder and leave the SteamApps folder completely alone. The SteamApps folder contains stuff relating to your games, etc. not Steam itself, and Steam doesn't write anything important to the registry that I'm aware of.

Of course, there is a minor risk of a completely borked install, so it might be wise to have your GCF's backed up somewhere anyway.

Anyway I'll upload the rar and you can decide whether you want to use it or not, since it's no hassle for me.

 

[Jintor]

I think I got it working again by deleting the dbghelp.dll file and the CSERHelper.dll file, for some reason. :/

Steam si weird.