How to Fix Steam "0% Update" Problem

In January, I spent quite a few money for Steam discounted games and happily play them on my old Lenovo IdeaPad laptop. Then, I bought a new ThinkPad business laptop while keeping all Steam purchases on the old one. And I end up with giving old laptop to my brother.

Symptom

Last week, there were ultimate discount for Valve games (Half-Life 2 series) and I can't resist. When I installed Steam on the new machine to play Gordon Freeman's second encounter, problem came.

When Steam is launched, it needs to update itself first. In my case, the progress is always at 0% and ends up with "Steam is temporarily unavailable" error. Cause

My ex-boss always says "Let be scientific" when you need to find the cause of problem.

Disabling any firewall, done. Remove every Steam temp files, no change.

I installed Steam on another laptop (third one) in the same network, same result. Moving to another network with different ISP, hopeless.

The last thing I try is bringing back the old laptop with workable Steam copy inside, running on the same network with the ThinkPad laptop. It's work!

Now I can identify the problem. It's Steam client itself.

Solution

I downloaded the Steam client directly from Steam web site. The file (steam.exe) is dated back to 14 September 2009. Quite weird. We are in July 2010 for today.

Fortunately, some people on Steam Forums have the same problem. Copying new revision of steam.exe to Steam folder fix this.

The file can be found from Steam Forum (another copy).

I hope this blog can help some other Steam users who have the same problem and find it by random search.