Steam 732897 is screwy

Lately I've been having a bit (A TON) of trouble with Steam. At first, I couldn't even log onto my account or play any games. The window would pop up: "Connecting Steam Account: username...," but it would freeze there. Launching games resulted in the same thing, more or less. Over the weekend everything worked fine, and I hadn't changed anything between the day it worked and the day it didn't. I've tried several methods to try and fix this: fixing registry errors, deleting blob files, repairing steam, gutting all of my steam files and reinstalling, and restoring my computer to a previous date (last Friday or something). As of right now, Steam will now start, but it takes at least 20 min to boot up, downloads at absurdly slow speeds, and will not close upon exit (I have to force shut it down in task manager). If I try to shut down the computer while Steam is still running, I get an error message saying Steam will not close and the computer cannot shut down. This forces me to go into task manager and close it, like I mentioned before. In the process description in task manager it says "Steam 732897." This same title shows up whenever the application decides not to respond. I know this is not an error code, but I have noticed that other people are having problems as well whenever this 732897 shows up.

My specs are in my sig, and I am running win 7 rtm x64.

I'd appreciate any help.

P.S. I've never been a fan of Steam. It's been buggy and unreliable, only serving to create more obstacles (which are often hard to overcome) when trying to play games. It's a shame I'm FORCED to use it in order to play my favorite titles. ARGH!

 

Sounds more like a network issue. Are Steam's ports being forwarded properly? Steam works perfectly fine on my home connection, but if I try to launch it (or any games using it) on my university network, where Steam's ports are blocked, I experience similar issues to what you're describing.

Try running Steam in Offline mode and see if this affects its stability, or that of any of your Steam games.

The way I see it, Steam is an excellent program if you have a reliable (and properly configured) connection. It's not perfect as it is, but in its earlier years, it was an absolute clusterhump. Consider yourself lucky.

 

Works just fine in offline mode. It starts up immediately, and exits like it should.

Any tips on how to make the online portion work? It was working absolutely perfectly on Friday.

Good connection or not, an obstacle is an obstacle. Just because you don't notice it doesn't mean it isn't there.

 

Sounds like you got a slow internet connection.

This

and this

happens to mine when my internet connection is throttled down to dial up speeds.

 

As Flipfire mentioned above (throttled down), this happens quite abit during peak usage hours, especially if you are on a DSL connection. Before I got my cable modem hooked up, I had a DSL connection which worked great early in the morning and very late at night. Any other time though and I would get time outs and drops constantly.

 

Internet speed is just fine, as far as I can tell. Downloads from elsewhere are as fast as ever.

Would it explain the failure to shut down the app, or even the computer? The window will close, but it still runs in the background.

 

It wont shutdown because its still busy trying to sync with steam. Can you do a www.speedtest.net

 

Yeah.

 

Holy crap, those are excellent speeds. Well, I would look to your university's network setup as the next most likely candidate. Your actual internet connection is great, but if your network isn't letting Steam through properly, then it doesn't matter.

 

Ahh, using a University internet connection.....fun. Check with their IT department or whatever they call it there. They may be trying to block or restrict "game" connections.

Has anyone else experienced the same problems as yourself? If it is only your computer, then I might consider backing up data, reformatting and re-installing windows. If you do not have Win7, now would be a good time to change over to it.

 

Yeah the ports might be blocked on weekdays. Try again on the weekend

 

It is the connection. I don't think it's a weekday thing. It's probably just been sketchy these past few days. I hope it gets better soon.

After installing my games via a game disk, I was able to boot them up. However, the connection was bollocks (I tried to play MW2). Suffice to say that until the connection gets any better, I can't play. Kinda sucks, but what can you do.

It's interesting how something as simple as an internet problem can surface in such an elaborate way.

All of the other problems fixed themselves after I went into offline mode.

Anyways, thanks everyone for helping me in what turned out to be a pretty anti-climactic issue.

 

I'm glad to help. I'm just sorry we can't really fix it.

 

Haha, reminds me of when i was at the university. I'd dl from MU 3 simultaneous links each at a few mb/s each, around 6~10 mb/s total. Go to dl from steam, 10 kb/s.

 

Yeah the probably QoS'd the steam service or port to the lowest priority/speed