AFK a few days

[Charizard]

Apparently it's that time of month for my computer so I'm busy fixing a bunch of crap and unfortunately a lot of programs are currently missing. With work factored in and having to reinstall everything after I fix this crap, I should be back up and killing you whores sometime this weekend.

[Charizard]

Well, as it stands, there's an error in steam and I can't fix it so I can't use anything through steam anymore. The error I have is: SteamStartup(0xf,0x0012f960)failed with error 1: failed to take master pipe connection lock. (among others.. I also get "the handle is invalid." bullshit as well)

Been looking through FAQ and such all over the internet and not one single explanation on how to properly fix it.

Have tried: restarting steam, restarting computer, renaming .blob file, deleting other files except the .exe and apps folder, removed steam and games from computer, redownloading them; and still get the same error message. Every thing on my computer works just fine as it always has.

[Charizard]

Update: so I think I might have found the solution so I'm currently downloading the content back and seeing if it will load this time around.

edit: nope it still hates me false alarm

[bmh]

When you uninstall Steam be sure to delete the Steam folder in the ProgramFiles folder because uninstalling just Steam doesn't delete the entire folder of games info that's included. Either that, or uninstall each game first followed by the Steam client and then delete the Steam folder. Run a registry cleaner (CCleaner should be harmless enough yet thorough enough to do the job), reboot, and install everything again. I had a similar issue months ago and that's what finally worked for me - BUT ONLY AFTER DELETING THE REMAINING STEAM FOLDER.

Good luck!

[Charizard]

Yeah what I tried this time was delete the folder (I have CCleaner so I'm ahead of you ), run regedit, delete the HKEY_CURRENT_USER/software/valve and the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/valve, then run windows install clean up and remove steam, restart system, re-download/install and still no go. I also tried it a 2nd time, this time repeating the other steps and then including a delete of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Valve, and finishing. I figured a complete clean up might do the trick, but its being a pain in the ass right now. Doesn't seem to be my programs (CCleaner, COMODO, Spybot or Ad-aware) that are the cause of anything as I've run them fine with Steam for years.

I'm thinking it may be a missing driver or corrupted file somewhere in my windows directory that may be fucking doing this bullshit, but not really sure what at this point. I've already been messaging steam support about this and I'll see what they send me tomorrow since I've done all this so far with no luck. Actually, to make one note, the one program that has been acting slightly weird is firefox as it has been having a tendency to have some sort of "erroneous shut-down" after I close it, which has only started in the last day or so. As far as viruses, trojans or keyloggers go, my system is clean. Right now I'm about to run a defrag and clean the disk to see if that might be a quick fix (yeah I know.. wishful thinking, but wouldn't hurt).

[Charizard]

This time around I decided to test my startup and went with MSCONFIG and tried a selective startup by hiding all the system services and disabling the non's-. Worked like a charm and Steam seemed to work just fine when loading them up one-by-one. I pretty much narrowed it down to a startup non-microsoft service and will kill this fucking bastard once and for all!!!

[bmh]

Yea! Glad to see you have figured it out. I guess I'll put my target back on now...