Figured out how to fix game crashing on startup.

[Br44]

Been having trouble playing DL2 for a long time now because the game would crash every time I got to the main screen that says to push any key to start. It would act like it's loading, the whirling loading icon in the bottom corner would spin for a second, and then I would crash to desktop. Been this way for months. Deleting and reinstalling the game did not fix it. Verifying game files did not fix it. I even left a bad review of the game because of this nonsense.

Anyhow, a buddy of mine helped me look through the crash logs and compared everything to what his own properly functioning game looked like. My crash log had the following lines.
{13:43:20.533} RETL: [AuthenticateData] > Bad crc data7.pak!
{13:43:20.533} RETL: [AuthenticateData] > Your game data appear to be corrupted!
{13:43:20.533} INFO: [INFO] > Your game data appear to be corrupted. Multiplayer mode will be disabled.

He looked in his own install directory and noticed data7 didn't exist. Mine had data7 files. So we deleted them from my installation and the game began to work. Our best guess is this is an old file from an older version of the game that was throwing a wrench in the works.

Hope this helps. Really ticked the devs didn't figure this out on their own, and we had to fix their game for them.