I just bought Half-Life 2 using an ATI voucher on Steam. Got the silver pack for $10+&1.75 tax, bought up the list of games to play, selected Half-Life 2 and it began updating itself on 512k DSL.....for SEVEN hours?!?!?, anyway, it eventually finished at around 3:45AM saying "Ready to Play", yeah right! time for bed more like it! Apparently Valve think steam is the fastest way to get hold of their new games?... maybe if you live in the north pole! Turned my computer tonight to run the game, it won't let me play in offline mode for some reason, but anyway when I run Half-life 2, it adjusts my desktop screen resolution from 1280x1024, blacks out the system tray and just sits there for 15 minutes with the HDD light occasionally flashing, then goes through some cut screen and comes to an image of a blurred city-scape with "Loading..." in the bottom right hand corner. I can still move the cursor and the HDD light is still flashing now and again so it hasn't locked up....but i'm wondering because it's been on this screen for over 45 minutes and counting?? I might as well be loading a game from cassette tape, it'd probably be quicker! I only wanted a quick blast to see what the fuss is about.. Surely theres no future in this whole Steam faff? AMD Athlon XP2200+ Aero7 lite 512mb Crucial pc2700 Abit NF7-s V2.0 80GB Seagate SATA 120GB Seagate SATA Geforce4 Ti4200 128mb Benq FP767-12 17" 12ms SB live 5.1 Digital

Well, let me tell you about my experience w/steam. Yes, steam does SUCK big time! It's just a P in the A any way you look at it, and you are right, it has NO future, that's for sure. Even the copy protection was a joke for a non-pro like me, In the last few months I have installed my original copy (yes I actually bought the game) on a bunch of friend's computers, we simply all share the same steam account. ...But look I have dial-up the the first update (and only one I've ever needed) only took about 30 min total. I play "offline" since then. I have 512 mb of stoneage PC133 and the game loads in less than a minute, maybe 90sec tops on a few levels. I have an o/c'd P4 running at a bit over 2.0GHz and the game runs great. And a 9600 pro o/c at 500MHz/500MHz, damn smooth gameplay w/no artifacts at full settings at 1024x768. ...So what I'm trying to tell yo is that we have similar systems and what you have been experiencing is not "normal" hl2/steam behaviour, still I have no clue what the problem could be since I have never had an AMD nor an Nvidia. I think it has to do with your Steam settings, try to play "offline" somehow. Maybe it's your soundblaster or video drivers, could ur drive need a defrag? no clue. Good luck. Peace.

can't help but agree that STEAM indeed SUCKS,been trying to update my CSS since god knows when.anyway about ur problem it could be due to corrupted .gcf files.that's where game data are hidden/stored/compressed.hop over to http://steampowered.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/steampowered.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=282&p_created=1101182584&p_sid=uyF47qBh&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPSZwX3NvcnRfYnk9JnBfZ3JpZHNvcnQ9JnBfcm93X2NudD0yNjUmcF9wcm9kcz0mcF9jYXRzPSZwX3B2PSZwX2N2PSZwX3BhZ2U9MQ**&p_li=&p_topview=1 and click on "To validate Half-Life 2". i hope this helps and yes STEAM still SUCKS despite all that support online which doens't seems to help