For several years, I have happily used Steam under a restricted user account in WinXP. After installing under admin privileges, I simply added my user account in the security settings for the Steam tree and everything worked perfectly; adding games, updating Steam, launching apps etc.
Yesterday, I rebuilt my system and suddenly I can't get it to work. To the best of my knowledge, I didn't do anything different and the Steam support forums suggest this is the proper way, not that they are very helpful on the subject. Google gave no extra clues.
Obviously, I'm overlooking something here. I can still update Steam and install games as a restricted user, but hl.exe crashes to desktop on launch after a short glimpse of the title screen, no error message. It's not drivers or firewall settings, running as admin works just fine.
Suggestions, anyone? It would help with a crash report, but I can't seem to find one.
BLOB-file? Make sure Steam is not on. Delete the BLOB-file, restart Steam.
It solves many problems, who knows this one also.
If that doesn't work; It seems a bit like I have with any EA-game, it doesn't like F@H (F@H). Not sure if you have it running but worth a shot by turning it off (same for other large background programs).
.blob errors would crash steam.exe and I only have trouble with actually launching a game with Steam, i.e. running hl.exe. Not that I haven't tried just in case..
For now, I'm just using "run as..", but it's not really ideal, for obvious reasons.