SOLVED: Unable to update TF2: "corrupt content files"

[Czech]

SOLVED: I am leaving this here for other people that may have the same issue as me. Good luck!

I am having a very strange problem that I did not notice until today when TF2 tried to update. The issue seems to affect all of my games that are setup with symbolic links; I recently upgraded to Windows 10.

TL;DR:
The problem: When I try and install a TF2 update and play the game, I get the following message: http://prntscr.com/99nsut
The solution: Run steam as administrator until Valve issues a fix.

I have a fairly complex setup on my PC whereby I copy heavily-accessed files to my solid state drive (since it is a small SSD) and symbolically link them. This optimization allows me to load and play games in seconds as opposed to minutes. In Windows 7 everything worked great, but in Windows 10 the rules seem to have changed. Up until today I was able to play TF2 just fine on any server I wanted. The game never spit out any errors and I never noticed any problems. However, today an update was released for TF2 and I was required to install it before I could play on the servers that I frequent.

Three games in my library (TF2, Rocket League, and Don't Starve Together) all required updates today, but none of them would install and I was given the same error message on all three ( http://prntscr.com/99nsut ). Immediately I tested to see if the issue was related to my symlinks by copying "Don't Starve Together" back to the steam directory and removing its old symlink. The game updated just fine and ran!

Unfortunately this is not an acceptable solution because my TF2 directory is ~30GB large and I also symlink various GCF files that amount to ~15GB as well. I cannot be bothered to copy 45GB of data back to my slow HDD only to copy it back to my SSD after it has finished updating. This is because:
1) It takes a very long time to copy effectively 90GB of data with a conventional hard drive in the mix.
2) I would have to repeat this process for every update, even if the update is only a couple MB.
3) The process of copying ~45GB to my SSD every update would vastly accelerate the wear and tear on it and I would end up losing writable blocks far sooner.

At first I thought that UAC might be the culprit so I turned it "off" in the control panel. I say "off" because in Windows 10 you cannot completely disable UAC without editing a group policy or registry key for "EnableLUA". However, I cannot fully disable UAC because setting "EnableLUA" to 0 causes many native applications to stop working (thank you for that, Microsoft!). Hence, even if completely turning off UAC were to fix the problem, it would break far more things than it fixes.

Does anyone have a similar setup and a solution to this problem? I am very technical, so you don't have to hold my hand by writing a huge guide. I am a software programmer, so any help is better than no help. PLEASE HELP ME!

UPDATES:
I am currently attempting some "run-as administrator" stuff... SOLVED!
It turns out that the update steam did for compatibility with Windows 10 does not address all of the issues. In the update text I was told that it needed to install such components so that steam would run under the administrator account. It does not. You still have to manually start steam as an administrator or convey to the OS that it must start in such a way every time. I feel that this may be a bug with steam.

[the gas station]

The issue is not one about communication, nor is it, strictly speaking, an issue about language; it concerns, rather, the nature of thought itself. Common to both “pragmatism” and “idealism,” is the view that to think about a thing, or to interpret or conceptualize it, and hence to have a belief about it, is essentially to relate the thing to other things, actual or possible, and therefore to “refer beyond it.” It is this view – and not any view about language or communication – that we must oppose if we are to say of some statements about appearing, or of any other statements, that they “justify themselves.” To think about the way in which something is now appearing, according to the view in question, is to relate that way of appearing to something else, possibly to certain future experiences, possibly to the way in which things of a certain sort may be commonly expected to appear.

[Czech]

Originally posted by 液体Rolls-Royce(rare)#freegucc:

The issue is not one about communication, nor is it, strictly speaking, an issue about language; it concerns, rather, the nature of thought itself. Common to both “pragmatism” and “idealism,” is the view that to think about a thing, or to interpret or conceptualize it, and hence to have a belief about it, is essentially to relate the thing to other things, actual or possible, and therefore to “refer beyond it.” It is this view – and not any view about language or communication – that we must oppose if we are to say of some statements about appearing, or of any other statements, that they “justify themselves.” To think about the way in which something is now appearing, according to the view in question, is to relate that way of appearing to something else, possibly to certain future experiences, possibly to the way in which things of a certain sort may be commonly expected to appear.

oh mah gawd, so helpful, 8/8 m8
By the way, I solved it and you have waayyy too much free time on your hands, lol ;)

[Czech]

Originally posted by iScryz:

how did you fix is Czech

I made this post over 5 years ago, so I don't remember all of the details. In the main post it says I was able to overcome the issue by forcing steam to start with administrative permissions. This can be achieved by right-clicking the program and choosing to run it as admin, or by mutating the properties on the shortcut/executable to make it the default behavior.

Does this not work for you? If not I may be able to help further, but I have since upgraded my PC and obtained a high-capacity NAND SSD and no longer have the need to symlink resources for Steam.

One other option you may have is to tell Steam to install specific games directly to a different drive so that you do not have to symlink as often. Although, I am not sure if that will solve your particular use case.

[DAELTHA]

Hello, thank you for posting your way to solve this, it was helpful

[Sabrine]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.