Startup Movie issue may cause games to fail to display

[BeardWarrior]

From time to time my Steam Deck will become stuck in a state where the Startup Movie does not display on wake and instead displays the message "Reconnecting to Steam", resulting in an issue where Steam persistently displays in front of any applications opened in Game Mode. The games load properly and become visible in the background when viewing the Steam Menu or Quick Settings menu, but disappear again when the overlay is dismissed. This makes it impossible to play any games until the Deck is rebooted or toggled into desktop mode and back.

Whenever the Steam Deck is in this state, the selected Startup Movie will display at first boot or when switching back from Desktop mode, but will not display following a wake from sleep.

I believe this issue is tied to a Startup Movie misconfiguration. I have a large selection of movies, including almost all of the official Points Shop ones and a few unofficial ones from steamdeckrepo.com, and my son likes to go through all of them, changing the movie selection, putting the deck to sleep, and waking it back up to watch the movie. This issue usually crops up after one of these sessions, and changing the startup movie or toggling "Shuffle Startup Movie" will immediately resolve the issue, causing the failed startup movie to immediately play and allowing other applications to display over Steam as usual. I have not been able to reliably recreate this issue myself, but my 5-year-old seems to do so with ease, causing my no end of headaches until I narrowed it down.

This may be specifically related to custom startup movies, as the last time this issue occurred it was with this specific video selected: https://steamdeckrepo.com/post/YGQZn/psx_style_boot_anim

For what it's worth, the same behavior presents with the current Stable, Beta, and Preview branches.