Two different Steam issues, may be unrelated.

[foster79]

First problem:

The big one started in the last few days. Every time I try to open Steam the bootstrapper will look for updates, then it will give me the "connecting to Steam account (name)" window, then it instantly crashes to desktop. No popups or error messages, it just will not open past that point.

Things I've tried:

Deleting and reinstalling Steam. I get the same problem with a fresh installation, except the very first time I ran the reinstalled Steam I actually made it to the library page and started reinstalling a game, then it crashed to desktop without warning. Since then I just get to the "connecting to account" window.

Any ideas? I've seen tons of posts here and in the Steam forums about this exact kind of issue but I haven't seen a lot of solutions.

Second problem:

This is trivial unless it's related to the first problem, but I don't think it is since it's been happening for years without causing any crashes to desktop. Every time I start Steam I get a popup saying an incompatible version of some Lavasoft Web Companion .dll has been found and I need to update or delete it. The problem is I don't HAVE Lavasoft Web Companion, or any other Lavasoft products. When I search my files for the specific one the popup mentions I can't find it anywhere on my pc. It doesn't seem to exist so I CAN'T update or delete it. This doesn't seem like a huge problem since every time I just click OK and Steam opens normally, at least until this new crash to desktop issue began. But like I said I don't know if they're related at all.

Things I've tried:

Aside from searching for the file and not finding it, I tried just downloading and installing Lavasoft Web Companion so the file would exist, then uninstalling it so it would be gone. Didn't matter, Steam is still accusing me of having it.

Any advice on either of these? This is another problem where I found tons of people asking about it but not a lot of answers.