Steaming about Steam

Some friends have been hassling me to install Steam for a while now, and so earlier this week I gave it a try – however things didn’t really go smoothly, in fact they didn’t go at all.

After the MSI installation finishes, Steam does a small update, restarts, and then either sticks on “Updating 0% Complete”, or throws an exception saying “To run Steam, you must first connect to the Internet”.

It seems these are pretty common problems, and there’s a lot of posts out there offering many fixes for this, however none of them have worked for me so far. Here’s a quick list of what I’ve tried so far:

Note there may be things missing from this list! I’ve been messing with this on and off for a few days now and have lost track a little in terms of what I’ve tried, and I’ve also tried various different combinations of things below.

• Deleted ClientRegistry.blob
• Disabled the Windows firewall
• Reinstalled – many times
• Rebooted – many times
• Checked the Steam Network Status
• Read a whole load of posts on the Steam Forums
• Ran with Administrator privilege
• Ran in Windows2000 compatibility mode
• Ran in Windows XP compatibility mode
• Ran with the –clearbeta switch
• Ran with the –tcp switch
• Quit any and every piece of software (including background processes) which even had a vague chance of affecting anything – in the end I ended up shutting down every process I could
• While shutting down the above processes, I was running Steam each time, as well as deleting ClientRegistry.blog and running it again
• Cleared my hosts file and ran ipconfig /flushdns
• Installed on 2 other computers – one was also Windows 7 Enterprise 64bit, the other was a straight Windows XP SP3 VM
• Installed Steam on OSX – which worked fine.
• Took the ClientRegistry.blob file from OSX and copied it onto my Windows machine
• Edited the ClientRegistry.blob file from OSX in case there was any interesting values such as MakeThisThingWork=1
• Edited ClientRegistry.blob with the Steam Registry editor, entering many different values into CellId (another related link is this one which contains more region based IPs)
• Did this (which looked better, as it did contact steam to update.. to the same version that the MSI installs, at which point it reverts back to the same errors).
• Installed some network monitors (Wireshark and Netlimiter) to make sure network connections were being made (they are)

So for now, I’m giving up on Steam. I do have a feeling that it could be something to do with a new beta client that could be screwing things up for everyone, but the amount of noise out there online about these issues makes it hard to tell. I’m glad to have the Mac and multiple other machines to test on to allow me to eliminate my ISP + Router configuration from the list of suspects.

I’d really like to give Rift a shot, so if there’s any other suggestions people might have I’d love to hear them.

Tags: Gaming

 Print | Posted on Sunday, March 13, 2011 12:55 PM |