Update: After a fresh reinstall and using VXKex to fool it as it were on Win10, It finally opened up without freezing (probably due to 2 more windows opening up on the top of Steam's) and an error message poped up saying SteamWebHelper is not responding (Steam's main window is still black), also giving me 5 different choices (Restart Steam, without GPU accel, without sandbox, restart SteamWebHelper, just exit Steam). Which of the first 4 would the most assertive workaround?
Another update: It ran fine without GPU acceleration, so I disabled it altogether while it was temporary off and now it's working fine again. It's currently running with VXKex on with the most up-to-date version and I haven't faced any other issue so far.
One more update: Tried Disabling VXKex to avoid problems with games and after the update, it's still working. So H/W accel was causing the system freezes.
Chromium's sandbox code was critically changed in the last year or so to become incompatible with operating systems before Bugcrash 10. Specifically, the sandbox on the GPU rendering processes was broken, which may be why the client was not functioning properly with the HW accel option enabled. I haven't been following the latest Steam clients and whatever version of CEF they use now, but it's probably dated after the breaking sandbox changes. You may be able to run the Steam client with the sandboxes disabled, depending on how many of the CEF feature switches are still honored by the current Steam client. I don't remember exactly which ones to look for, but you might be able to find them with a Google search. Then you could have partial GPU rendering of the vile Steam client and save your CPU from burning on all the CEF garbage, at the cost of no sandboxing ofc.
I tried many earlier versions from last year but they were all freezing my entire system. Strangely it wasn't happening at all until this month. At the same day I ran Steam 3 times in a row it froze on the last run and never ran again until I finally disabled H/w acceleration. It had always been turned on without any issues until this month. After the first freeze happened, no earlier versions would work either.
That is really interesting. Maybe something from a newer CEF was left behind when you installed older clients and adversely affected them. If you want to go back down that rabbit hole (I don't blame you if you don't want to), try any of the M86 CEF clients (December 2023 and earlier). IIRC it was the January 2024 client that moved to M109, which should be just fine on 7, but Valve uses their own fork of CEF with a variety of changes, and the M109 clients are the past Valve's "official" cutoff date for bothering to care about OSes before Bugcrash, so I can't say the M109 clients are known good configurations for HW acceleration working. The M86 ones are, though. Also really interesting that it was freezing your entire system. Maybe it wasn't related at all to current day CEF's incompatibility with NT 6.1 and was something else instead.
And what's even more puzzling about it is that I also did a complete system restore to the day it was working but the exact same thing happened afterwards.
Hi, does anyone still have OP steam_dec2022_win32.7z file? I used to use it and worked really well, link is dead unfortunately.
Well i downloaded the 2022 december client files from archive.org, checked the mega.nz link, tried to extract the same way as it is shown in the video with 7zip ZS but not all files could be extracted. So I can't even extract all the required files, such as executables. Friends service didn't work back last summer, yes, idc for really any client features except for being able to log in, download a few legacy games to play them (like all pre 2020).
Yes, I've noticed that some (but not all) older games & workshop items are still stored in LZMA-compressed depot chunks on Valve's servers. That means clients before the 2025-03-29 client can still download those older things. However, Valve has retroactively converted most old games & workshop items to be stored in zstd-compressed chunks, which means only the 2025-03-29 client and newer can download them. They seem to be prioritizing converting games & workshop items that are 1) more recent and 2) more popular, but they are slowly working through every single game & workshop item held hostage on their servers and I expect all of them to become zstd-compressed eventually, sadly. Your screenshot there shows Quake Champions - I don't know if this game is now zstd-compressed in its depots or not, but you won't know until the download gets to a point where a chunk needs to be decompressed. Sometimes that's at 99% progress at the very end, sometimes it's a lot earlier, like maybe at 30% download progress. Everything looks normal, like it's downloading just fine, until it suddenly fails with a "CORRUPT DOWNLOAD" error. That's how you know that game or workshop item is now zstd instead of LZMA. When the download fails like that, you have to go to the Steam Settings -> Download -> Clear Download Cache, then close Steam and use a newer Steam client or steamcmd to download and install that game. This download issue is exacerbated by the Steamworks Common Redstributables "game". If other games use common redists like MSVC or PhysX, then installing and also updating that game will make Steam force a download of the Steamworks Common Redstributables. This is a problem since the Steamworks Common Redstributables are now 100% zstd-compressed, and so they will always fail, and when they do fail, Steam will wipe all existing versions of those files from your steamapps, which makes the client force a new (broken) download of Steamworks Common Redstributables yet again, which results in an endless cycle. Once your client is stuck in this loop, you must do a Clear Download Cache every single time you launch your Steam client (i.e. every time your PC restarts). This means you have to re-login to the Steam client every time as well, since Clear Download Cache logs you out. If you do this, Steam will temporarily ignore the broken Steamworks Common Redstributables files and allow you to launch games that use them - until you close the client and launch it again, at which point you have to do another Clear Download Cache. Just another thing to be aware of.
Fortunately it is working perfectly (thanks to you), and hopefully gonna work for a long time as this game has never been that popular (its unoptimized trash, but thats the only thing I use steam for), for everything else there is cs rin ru. You are very knowledgable of inner workings of steam, so thanks again, bloodbath tonight could not have happened without your help!