365 Discoveries

I’m making a note here in the hopes that, perhaps, it will help a frustrated gamer out there, somewhere. The issue at hand occurs when you try to launch Team Fortress 2 (TF2), Half-Life (HL, HL2), or Counter-Strike (CS) (any game connected to Steam that uses the HL2 engine). Steam will launch a small window stating “Verifying Game Files.” Typically, this only takes place after updates to the game, or Steam, if Steam detects any game files have been changed, or if selected to do so manually. The issue occurs, however, on every launch. The process launches, subsequently takes a few seconds to “check” — even though it should take a minute or two — then terminates without launching your desired game.

The Steam forums and other gamer forums around the ‘tubes have a variety of fixes for this issue (and others). I will list them briefly:

• Check the minimum system requirements for your game. (No really… do this)
• Verify your game cache files manually
• Make sure background programs, antivirus, or firewall programs aren’t causing a conflict
• Make sure there only one sound device in use on your computer. (If you have one on-board, and an audio card, disable one in BIOS)
• Check port forwarding and firewalls (both on your computer and your network’s router)
• Force game settings back into “Factory defaults”
• Check to see if Mss32.dll is in your Windows/system32 directory, installed by another game (details here)
• Update Windows, video drivers, DirectX, motherboard driver and BIOS firmware
• Add Steam and the game you’re trying to play to the DEP (Data Execution Prevention) exception list
• Disable video shadowing in BIOS
• Check compatibility issues with Intel cards (here)
• Rename “ClientRegistry.blob” in the Steam direction (Steam will download a fresh copy on next launch)
• Delete the game folder for the game in question (found in your Steam directory, again Steam downloads missing files on launch)
• Change the DirectX level the game uses, using the -dxlevel switch (more info here)
• Reinstall the offending game (delete common game files)
• Reinstall Steam

I tried all the above fixes, but none of them resolved my issue. Occasionally, I could make it past verifying and actually play the game, but  I could never pin down the ale that cured the ill. Eventually, I had to face the facts: my computer’s memory (RAM) was failing. I upgraded from 2 to 8GB recently, but in my excitement I neglected to test the new modules. Sure enough, one module was failing like Woot.com’s servers when the Bag of Crap is up. I removed the failing module, and everything’s run fine since. By the way, I used Memtest 86+ and tested each module individually.

Moral of the story… even if you think your beloved computer is faultless, it’s not, get it tested.