Generic Steam Troubleshooting Guidelines

This will walk you through how to resolve such issues as

[A-iD]*Error Verifying Steam User ID ticket
[A-pC]*Failed to take the master pipeline connection
[A-vS]*Failed to Connect to VAC servers
[A-fL]*Failed to load Friends
[A-iE]*Failed to load Ingame Explorer
[A-rI]*Games completely fail to load
[A-iC]*Cannot Connect to Steam Network
[V-bM]*I only have a black screen when launching Hl2 games.
[S-wB]*Steam.exe (main exception)Cannot open blob archive file

Search this thread for the prefix code to Skip to the proper Section.

[A-iD]
Error Verifying Steam User Id ticket.
This error occurs when your account is issued a new steam ID ticket.
Tickets are reissued on a weekly basis, or everytime your IP changed.
Sometimes, you can just restart Steam to acquire a new ticket.
However, you may have to manually acquire a new one on occasion.
->Log Out of Steam
->Navigate you ProgramFiles/Steam/ and delete Client Registry.Blob
->Start Steam.

[A-pC]
Failed to take the master pipeline connection
Sometimes, Steam files become "unregistered"
To fix this, verify your game cache.

->Right Click on steam Icon
->Select Games
->Select Game and right click for properties
->Select Local Files tab, and verify game files

If this does not solve the issue, or your getting this error on Startup,
->Stop Steam
->Delete ClientRegistry.blob and Steam.Dll
->Start Steam.

[A-vS]
Failed to Connect to VAC servers
Some programs such as Norton Firewall, and Xfire can prevent Steam from contacing the VAC servers.
To fix
->Close Steam
->Close Xfire, disable Norton Firewall
->Start Steam
->Start Xfire, and your firewall.
Doing this allows Steam to contact the VAC servers.

[A-fL]Failed to load Friends
[A-iE]Failed to load Ingame Explorer
Both of these can be fixed by
->Close Steam
->Navigate to ProgramFiles/Steam/
->Delete, Client Registry.Blob and GameOverlayRender and GameOverlayUI
->Start Steam

[A-rI]
Games completely fail to load
Rarely, Steam will fail to load any game.
To fix this
->Close Steam
->Delete all files in programFiles/steam/ except for SteamApps
->Run Regedit
->Search and delete all files with "Steam" in the name.
->Reinstall Steam with a fresh install.
->Start Steam.

[A-iC]
Cannot Connect to Steam Network
Firewalls and routers can block Traffic to the Steam Client.
^NOTE:Ports required for Steam can not be re-mapped to HTTP or reconfigured to a custom port range.
^NOTE:Dual WAN Routers are not compatible with Steam.
^NOTE:Peer Guardian is not compatible with Steam. Please disable Peer Guardian before launching Steam to avoid connection issues.
Please make sure the following ports are Open and Allowed on Both the Firewall, and the Router.
*UDP 27000 to 27030
*TCP 27014 to 27050
*UDP 4380

[V-bM]
I only have a black screen when launching Hl2 games.
This is most commonly caused by Invalid DxLevel and command line conflict
To repair, lets start with command line checking
->Right click Steam Icon.
->Go to games tab
->Right Click the game, and select properties
->Select Set Launch Options
->Erase all data, and type in -dxlevel 90
->Navigate to Steam/steamapps/yourname/<game>/<gamedir>/cfg
^{(Note: CSS is counterstrike source/cstrike, TF2 is Teamfortress 2 /tf/)}
and rename config.cfg to config.old
->Start the game.
Once it launches, close the game, and remove -dxlevel from the launch options.
Rebind all your keys, if your an advanced user, you can edit your configold.cfg to retrieve binds.

(*)If you are getting a black screen after alt tabbing
->Press teh keys for your Steam Ingame.
Mine is Shift Tab, So I would press Shift Tab to bring up my steam Ingame.
Black Screens after alt tabbing is due to slow loading of modules in memory.

[S-wB]
Steam.exe (main exception)Cannot open blob archive file:CMultiFieldBlob(mem-mapped filed):FAiled to open existing file,Wind32 Error 32 "The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process"
This is a really simple fix.
Just restart steam.

There are quite a few others, just post, and I shall Update this thread with the answer.
Mav, if you think its a good idea, Sticky.

It's time you finally built a PC - CHEAP!