Steam doesn't download anything

[Sunstriker]

Just fired up my gaming pc yesterday and tried to play some games after being away for a while. Steam does log in and works but isn't able to download any updates or install games from my collection. It's just stuck at "Starting Download". I can also see lots of thumbnails are missing, displaying the broken image icon we know from web browsers. The store seems to work fine. Things I've tried:

• Reinstall Steam
  
• Remove everything but steam.exe from the installation folder, when it tried to rebuild, it fails due to a HTTP error (looked in the bootstrap log)
  
• Disabled all network adapters from VMware and Virtualbox
  
• Checked the dns requests it's sending out: they resolve. Also set a static IP and DNS on the LAN adapter
  
• Cleared download cache and changed my region
  
• Tested Steam on my macbook on the same network, it works without any issues there
  
• Disabled the Windows Firewall, added a rule and allowed all traffic

I'm running out of ideas besides reinstalling Windows... Any help is greatly appreciated!
A piece of the log that might be helpful:

[2024-01-31 23:08:05] Download failed: http error 0 (cdn.steamstatic.com/client/steam_client_win32?t=3259732045)
[2024-01-31 23:08:05] DownloadManifest - exhausted list of download hosts
[2024-01-31 23:08:05] failed to load manifest from buffer.
[2024-01-31 23:08:05] Failed to load manifest
[2024-01-31 23:08:05] Error: Download failed: http error 0

[Satoru]

It means your firewall or ISP is killing it

Or your DNS is corrupted so it cannot resolve the name

[Sunstriker]

Firewall is disabled. ISP is out of the question: it works on my Macbook on the same network using the same DNS, router, ISP...

[Sunstriker]

It seems the Microsoft Store has the same issue on my PC

[Dr.Shadowds 🐉]

Originally posted by Sunstriker:

It seems the Microsoft Store has the same issue on my PC

You have to figure out what to did on your system for the issue to be happening.

Did you edit host file to block connection, or using any app that handle connection to block things?

Did you run app/bat file to edit settings on your system to block things?

Did you mess with files, and permissions from reading, or writing?

Did you mess with windows built in firewall, your 3rd party anti virus for connections for apps, or using custom fire wall to block connection to said device?

[Sunstriker]

I'm afraid I didn't do anything. Only updates could've caused this. I haven't been home for the last 3 months. So when I fired up the pc of course it downloaded some updates... I'm looking into that now. It seems like some secure connections cant be established depending on the app

[Sunstriker]

I found some useful log entries pointing in the direction I was thinking of:

[0201/174119.401:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_impl.cc(963)] handshake failed; returned -1, SSL error code 1, net_error -201

[Sunstriker]

As my last comment pointed out, there was something going on with the SSL handshake. This let me to manually update my root certificates, which is supposed to happen automatically with Windows Update, this fixed my issue. Check out this guide[support.microfocus.com]

[Satoru]

If you're not pulling the Root certificates from Microsoft. it means windows update is not running on your PC

[Sunstriker]

Yeah, well, Windows Update IS running and is fully up to date. Must be something else causing this. Anyway, I've updated them manually.

[rabmac2021]

My Bootstrap log appears to identify cdn.steamstatic.com/client/steam_client_win32 as the culprit for my steam client claiming it is offline and needs to be online to update itself.
Steam Support are utterly useless, and I have literally been trying 6 months to play my games

I CAN'T EVEN GET IT CONNECT WITH ANTI-VIRUS OFF AND THE fIREWALL DOWN ON ALL 3 NETWORKS.(sorry for caps) so I am now at a loss to know how to proceed. The new PC has had all it's innards replaced by Chillblast and it runs everything else I load on it except STEAM

I am beginning to think Steam and Steam Support are getting a bit long in the tooth

Where should cdn.steamstatic.com/client/steam_client_win32 exist, because it is nowhere to be seen on this New PC.

Begging for assistance, Rob

[brandymichael1]

I figured out how to get it to download the game currently letting it download, that doesn't mean it's going to play, I've been having this problem for about a month, it will download it but it won't play it. So how I got it to download it, was to just go BIG PICTURE MODE

[Freddy]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.