Portal 2 Not Working

[Saphira]

Ever since the update, Portal 2 keeps crashing on me. It loads just fine, I get to the menu screen, but then when I try to play--whether it's trying to load a file or start a new game--it goes to the loading screen, and then suddenly crashes when it finishes loading. I just see a black screen and hear the music glitching, and it occasionally flickers back to my desktop screen for a moment before going back to black. My computer keeps telling me portal.exe has stopped working.

Apparently, there is a fix for this: getting rid of a file called libsteam.dylib. Except that file doesn't exist anywhere in my Portal 2 folder. I've hunted through everything I can think of, even my other Portal folder (which works just fine). I'm on a PC; can anyone help me? Please?

[Dom44]

Try verifying game cache, if you will go to your game library, then right click on Portal 2, go to properties, and you will find it there. If that doesn't help, try reinstalling the game, and if this won't help either, then it might be your computer I mean that your computer isn't in compliance with minimum requirements.

[dub.Ninja]

The libsteam.dylib is a Mac fix, i dont know why ur also getting this error.

[Saphira]

gdi
I tried verifying the cache, uninstalling and reinstalling--nothing seems to work. But it's not like my computer's from the Dark Ages--it's a few years old, sure, but I'm running Windows 7 and have plenty of memory. True, my graphics card sucks, but what kills me is that IT WORKED BEFORE. A few months ago, last I played it. Nothing really major has happened to my computer since then.
blahhh I wish it would just wooooork...

Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated (and Dom's and Atomic's are as well; at least now I won't be chasing after a file that doesn't even exist).

[dub.Ninja]

Get to the menu and open the "console" and try loading a level to see what it says, it might help find the issue.

[Saphira]

No luck. No matter what I try going into, once it's past the loading screen, it crashes, and I have to force it to shut down.

[exi]

Same Problem here on MacOS. After loading Portal2 it crashes every time. Verifying game cache and a new install did nothing better.
I payed 20 Bugs and played it half way. : (

[KillerKoala78]

Try some suggestions in this FAQ.

Also are you getting an error message when it crashes? If so, what does the message say EXACTLY?

[DoughMeh]

Im having a similar issue. I tried loading Portal 2 and it froze on the opening screen and restarted my computer. I looked at the error report to see what happened after and apparently i got the bluescreen. So i try again and sure as hell i get the blue screen. It restarts. I try again and it loads! but super laggy. so i try and turn the graphics down and it freezes. So odd. I recently acquired a new computer and its basically the exact same as my previous. I have a powerful enough processor and way more ram than i would ever need. Also my video card is the same. I tried all the above ideas and nothing works. sad face.

[Saphira]

(Sorry, I moved to a new town at the beginning of October and forgot about this until now.)

I'm not getting any error message at all--the screen flickers back to my desktop (like it's zoomed in at the bottom left corner, but it does that with all games I play in fullscreen), then goes to black, and all I can hear is the first few notes of the music glitching and repeating, over and over and over. So I have to force the shut-down.
I did take a look at the FAQ (something I should have done in the first place) and did some of the things it suggested, like completely updating my OS, required and optional. I've just turned my firewall off temporarily, to see if that will help.

[Saphira]

Well, disabling the firewall made it do something...different. The game loaded much faster, but then began to crash after the loading screen again. This time, though, the music glitched for about five seconds, then moved onto the next few notes, glitched those for five seconds, then moved on. This went on for less than a minute, then suddenly all I got was a high whining noise, and I couldn't go back to my desktop, open the task manager--nothing. I had to shut down my computer manually and restart it. I guess bypassing the firewall specifically for Portal 2 would be better than disabling it entirely, but Webroot has a sort of weird setup...I'll try figuring that out and trying some other things on the FAQ.

...Oh, hell, apparently Webroot should be fully uninstalled before the game will work, hence why disabling the firewall sort of helped, but didn't fix the problem. So I have to choose between protecting my computer, as I'm without any alternatives and don't trust free programs, and playing Portal 2. Great.

[Saphira]

TAKE HEART! I DISCOVERED THE CAUSE! Somehow, my Portal 2 game files had all been moved into a folder called "common" within the Steam apps folder, instead of in the one with my username. If you're encountering a problem similar to mine, this may be your issue. Make sure your game is in your username folder (though to move it you have to exit out of Steam first), then go into your library and verify the game cache on that game (right click the game, to to Properties, then the Local Files tab, and verify the game cache). It'll tell you the files are all missing, and then begin retrieving them. It takes a while--about an hour for me--but worth it, because the game now plays! It's a bit laggy, but not unendurably so, and I'm fairly certain that's my computer's fault, since it's a few years old.
I really hope this helps someone else!

[Noah]

Wait how do I do this "common folder to username folder" switch?

[crazygerbil]

So, The way I fixed this is to go to "C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\common\Portal 2" and just delete everything in that folder, than verify the game cache through steam. As far as I am aware, moving it to another location is the same as deleting it. The reason it is in "common" as opposed to "<username>" is so that if you have two people who share the same computer, with different steam accounts, then you only have to have one copy of the game installed. So any files that are not different for each user go in the "common" folder.
In terms of the fix, for some reason manually deleting everything and then verifying worked, but using the "delete local content" option in steam fixed nothing.

[Taiga]

Oh my god thank you you beautiful person! I AM SO CLOSE TO CRYING IN THANKFULNESS!!!

[RanAway]

What worked for me was by changing the screen to 'run in window unbordered' then reducing the resolution. Say for example my native was 1650, i changed it to something like 1280. This should allow the level to load properly in level select. After you're in, you can revert the settings to whatever you want.