Various problems with steam. Telling me to sign in while already signed in.

[Fili9]

For the past two weeks or so I've had a strange problem where whenever I try to download mods or buy games, the steam client tells me to "Sign in" when i'm already signed in. Pressing the "sign in" button will result in a "Verifying login information..." message, which then turns into the error message "There was an error communicating with the Steam servers. Please try again later".

Downloading/Installing games also takes an unusual amount of time. Not that the download is slow, but the download simply will not start until maybe 30-60 minutes after pressing the install button. Connecting to the friend network also takes way longer than supposed to.

Another strange problem i have is that my library is not able to show any pictures for any games. Pictures and videos in Steam Store game pages works fine in the steam shop. My profile picture in the top right is also gone.

I have checked my firewall settings, deleted my browser cache in steam, partially reinstalled steam twice and fully uninstalled then reinstalled steam once. When i reinstall steam and try to log back in it tells me: "Steam is having trouble connecting to steam servers", even though i was logged in a few minutes before reinstalling steam.

I have no idea what has caused this. My internet connection is fine as i'm having no trouble with any other services. If anyone knows what's wrong or has had similar problems please help me with this.

[HaroldTheNorse]

About 5 minutes ago, I noticed that Steam chat via web interface may have hung (couldn't change online status). I tried to login again. I typed my username and password, clicked login, then I saw the same error message: "There was an error communicating with the network. Please try again later." This happened continually for the several minutes that I tried it.

Just now I was browsing the Steam forum and noticed that I was signed in already. This was expected, since I hadn't actually signed out.

Maybe there are intermittent problems with Steam's servers.

[hal]

It's Tuesday. I happens without fail when they do maintenance. It's been this way for years.

[Fili9]

It's not about maintenance since my Steam has been this way for over two weeks

[HaroldTheNorse]

Flli9, the symptoms you have described could be explained by a hard drive or SSD that is failing. You should check the S.M.A.R.T. status of your storage devices. Free and open source software for that is available here.

https://gsmartcontrol.shaduri.dev/downloads

This is a GUI interface for smartmontools, recommended by the developers of smartmontools on their website at https://www.smartmontools.org

After you install Gsmartcontrol and run it, wait for it to build a list of drives in your computer. Then right-click on each drive, click "View Details", then click "Attributes".

Here is the list of known S.M.A.R.T. attributes. The attributes that are highlighted in yellow indicate that the drive will fail soon. If you have a raw value greater than 0 of any of the highlighted attributes then you should backup the data on the drive and replace it as soon as possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Known_ATA_S.M.A.R.T._attributes

Also, Google says that many drives fail without warnings indicated in the S.M.A.R.T. status...

Bottom line, you should be testing with a different computer to rule out hardware and even software causes of the problems you have described.

[HaroldTheNorse]

Also, I'm not currently seeing the problems with Steam Chat that I described earlier. It does make sense that that could have been caused by Patch Tuesday.

[HaroldTheNorse]

Here is Steam official advice that could be useful to you, including troubleshooting game installation issues and a list of types of programs that can interfere with Steam downloads.

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4578-18A7-C819-8620

[HaroldTheNorse]

Just found this tip about Steam download speed. Your computer performance and the size of the existing game content are factors in the speed of downloading. During an update, Steam sends compressed differential files over the network to your computer. Your computer needs to do processing before, during and after the actual downloading. Some explanation here.

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/3426689579756592748/

If the game is 100 MB and it takes 30 to 60 minutes to start the download then okay something could be wrong. But, if the game is 100 GB and it takes 30 to 60 minutes to start the download then that is probably normal.