Steam, why you fail me now after 8 years ?!

[.osiRiS]

So something happened about a week ago where none of my games would update. A message of "Scanning Steam games for updates" would come up and would lock up my steam preventing me playing any of my games.

Now after deleting all of my steam folder except for steamapps as per Steams forums nothing has worked. I decided to try a fresh install so bye bye 400GB of steam games but now every time I try to install a new copy of steam I get the error "Steam.exe (main exception): To run Steam, you must first connect to the Internet"

Is this a sign for me to leave Steam and gaming ?! Apart from a fresh install of Windows I'm out of workable ideas. I tried everything in this thread and nothing works http://www.gpforums.co.nz/thread/469713/?s=

I'll be back with Part 2 of my internet dramas in the networking section with my horrid DSL connection stats at my new (old) place.

[Craigor]

Hmmm...

I have rar'd up my working steam installation (minus the steamapps cache)
download it, extract it over the top of your current steam install folder, and replace all files .. see what happens

I PM'd you the link..

If that fails, install steam in a new folder, like C:\Steam2, after installation, delete all the files in c:\steam2, extract my rar file into there, and then try to launch

If that fails.. I'll try think of something else

[.osiRiS]

No luck its signing in about 25% of the time and the rest it errors out saying im not connected. When I do connect I get the same scanning for game updates message.

[thedaybreakboy]

Had the same problem for a week.  Turned out that it was because I had set my firewall up to force all steam traffic through the Telstra server (when it was free, not sure if still is, anyway.)

I turned off firewall and the install worked, turned it back on, now everything all good.

By the way I had that same scanning error thing as well, that was why I was trying to reinstall in the first place.

[thedaybreakboy]

Same thing to me (scanning for a week, then couldn't install), turned out that the problem was I had forced everything through the Telstra server.  I turned firewall off, installed, turned back on, now all good.

[Nostargate]

Potatoes.

[The Demon Lord]

Potatoes.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]7908[/ATTACH]

[.osiRiS]

Sounds interesting, do go on.

[thedaybreakboy]

Turning off firewall work?

[.osiRiS]

The first time it would load then the same scanning steam games.

The next time it wouldn't load at all.

I have tried new installs and I get a bootstrapper .exe load which could be part of my problem. Google tells me it occurs due to a corrupted install or something. It's frustrating as I'm between two places during the week so I can't try and remedy this quickly.

[thedaybreakboy]

Shit, I really thought that would work.  Well I feel your pain, I was stuck for ten days before I got mine going.  Some of the .exes would still work, not that that helps I suppose if you've deleted your Apps folder.  Made me realise how much I'm at the mercy of Steam thoughand how totally non-existent their support is, I'm definitely using GOG from now on if I can help it.  Well good luck with it, I hope it resolves.

[Pyromanik]

Obviously it's time to install steam on linux.

[.osiRiS]

Update:

None of the above solutions worked so I just copied over files from my laptop which would update just fine. 48hrs it seems to download and log in just fine. Touch wood.

[Craigor]

Update:

None of the above solutions worked so I just copied over files from my laptop which would update just fine. 48hrs it seems to download and log in just fine. Touch wood.

So exactly like what I gave you, but your own game cache.. zzz steam

[.osiRiS]

Pretty much >_< just the craigor login went spazzy

[oefox]

I should've piped up earlier. I used to have a weird issue where steam would fail to update then get corrupt and spit the dummy with the only way to fix it being to run windows in safe mode with networking.

Turned out to be some weird windows background process where deleting a file would not actually delete the file immediately and this was breaking steam. I found the windows fix for this somewhere after googling and that resolved the steam issues.

I would suggest that should this reoccur, run in safe mode and if it works then it's the same issue and you should fix the windows bug.

[Craigor]

Pretty much >_< just the craigor login went spazzy

Who you callin' spazzy :-p

[.osiRiS]

I give up lol windows update stuffed me again tried to revert back and no luck. I quit.

[Pyromanik]

Stop using windows.
Specifically windows update.

[.osiRiS]

Oh yea, cool.