SteamService.exe missing

[Jimbob Helldiver]

At some point in the last couple of days I had a steam update go bad. Now when I restart my computer the steam.exe has been renamed to steam.exe.old. Renaming it to steam.exe again allows steam to work, more or less, after a round of extracting update packages and installing them, but when i start steam it says:

"The Steam service component is not working properly on this computer. Reinstalling the Steam service requires administrator privileges."
Clicking the Install Service button gives a windows error that the SteamService.exe file cannot be found, a quick check shows that it is indeed missing from the bin folder. No amount of checking for updates and restarts have forced steam to redownload this apparently critical file, redownloading and running the install client just gives me an error that steam is already installed. Obviously I'm not keen on just deleting steam and my many installed games and redownloading them, so does anyone know how I can force the client to pull all files again instead of attempting to extract an update from an apparently corrupted update package?

[Jimbob Helldiver]

Answer: opt into the beta program and then install the steamservice.exe manually from the command line.
Holy crap guys there needs to be an easier way to repair the steam client.

[Jimbob Helldiver]

Okay, no that was not the solution. What the ♥♥♥♥.

[Harley Quinn]

Hey, try to reinstall steam. Or maybe worst case scenario, reset your PC/Laptop and try then?

[WunjoX]

Nice !!!

[Jimbob Helldiver]

Originally posted by Harley Quinn:

Hey, try to reinstall steam. Or maybe worst case scenario, reset your PC/Laptop and try then?

You did not read what I wrote.
I have already tried reinstalling steam, as well as restarting my computer, as well as deleting the entire steam directory apart from the Steam.exe itself.

Deleting and reinstalling steam requires either a redownload of your entire game library or copying everything you have installed into a new directory, which is also not feasible, I have many hundreds of gigabytes of games installed.

In the end the solution proved to be deleting the packages folder over and over again and attempting the install over and over again.

Garbage as ♥♥♥♥.