Does everyone noticing that recently Steam Client didn't work starting at around 22 November? Any good workarounds so far?

[WeyonEleven-Twelve]

Hello there, to everyone here, have you guys noticed that the Steam Client itself has been buggy for quite a lot of people? Because I had that problem on the same day I tried to open Steam even though there weren't any problems yesterday? I also went for a quick rundown of the forums and it reveals that an observable number of people also had this problem.

In my case, I have found my Steam to have the same "Steamwebhelper is not responding suddenly" and I clicked the disable GPU acceleration option, and that's the exact moment Steam just...stopped showing anything, but it does run according to Task Manager. Weirdly, the task manager will sometimes show multiple instances of Steamwebhelper being activated for less than 3 seconds before disappearing, and even using the steam://flushconfig function in Run did not display the warning window.

All of the troubleshooting I've done so far:
Reinstalling Steam.
Put Steam as Administrator.
Made sure there aren't any additional displays or anything else weird connected to my laptop.
Stuck myself in 23H2 Win 11 as this Windows version does not have any issues in running Steam before today.

PS: According to this link (https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/0/682986292645131197/), some people said that making a new Windows account can solve the issue, but I am not going to inconvenience myself to move accounts around just to play games.

[Meme Machine]

I have the same exact issue, everything I've tried has not worked so far, and am also not going to make a whole new windows account

[Patches]

I'm having the exact same issue right now. I've tried all possible solutions already, even following that Suspend Task thing and Steam still won't start up.

[WeyonEleven-Twelve]

UPDATE: After I added the –no-cef-sandbox on the shortcut target from the icon's properties, my Steam did another update to the system and finally opened the client!

[WeyonEleven-Twelve]

Originally posted by Meme Machine:

I have the same exact issue, everything I've tried has not worked so far, and am also not going to make a whole new windows account

I managed to fix this by adding –no-cef-sandbox on the "Target" by right-clicking on the Steam Icon, followed by clicking the Properties button.

[WeyonEleven-Twelve]

Originally posted by Patches:

I'm having the exact same issue right now. I've tried all possible solutions already, even following that Suspend Task thing and Steam still won't start up.

I managed to fix this by adding –no-cef-sandbox on the "Target" by right-clicking on the Steam Icon, followed by clicking the Properties button.

[zaphodikus]

Originally posted by WeyonEleven-Twelve:

Originally posted by Patches:

I'm having the exact same issue right now. I've tried all possible solutions already, even following that Suspend Task thing and Steam still won't start up.

I managed to fix this by adding –no-cef-sandbox on the "Target" by right-clicking on the Steam Icon, followed by clicking the Properties button.

Why, or how did you decide that this magic rune change would have any effect? How did you come to this magical parameter change?

[WeyonEleven-Twelve]

Originally posted by zaphodikus:

Originally posted by WeyonEleven-Twelve:

I managed to fix this by adding –no-cef-sandbox on the "Target" by right-clicking on the Steam Icon, followed by clicking the Properties button.

Why, or how did you decide that this magic rune change would have any effect? How did you come to this magical parameter change?

Found this workaround here: https://www.reddit.com/r/steamsupport/comments/1fihhuf/steam_only_turns_on_with_the_option_with_browser/

It turns out the command is basically disabling the Steam Client's Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), in which the PC will just skip interfacing with the "Sandbox environment" and directly interacting with the website of Steam's Store page.

Also, when you put this command the first time and reenable it (make sure you kill the Steam processes via the Task Manager), make sure the first thing you see is the update window shows you will need to let Steam update itself with a rather large file, then after it installs, the issue will solve by itself(at least in my case).

Then, go to Steam > Settings > Downloads and select Clear Download Cache. Steam should close, and you can remove the command from the icon's properties before opening it again, since CEF is a security feature of not letting online malicious content get into your PC via the Steam Client.

[zaphodikus]

^^Points awarded, good explainer ^^
Thanks, feels like I should bookmark this, and maybe even automate it.
I usually just kill the processes, and reboot if that does not work. And am now tempted to write a watch-dogger script, because their launch watchdog is clearly miserably failing. And all these tips are helpful, because security needs to remain central. I will have to find a way to automate the cache clearing, because often I just wait about 10 minutes, and then steam does finally start on it's own. I want to first tail all the logs to build a picture of what is going on though, and this it a good clue, cheers WeyonEleven.

[Zefar]

Originally posted by WeyonEleven-Twelve:

Hello there, to everyone here, have you guys noticed that the Steam Client itself has been buggy for quite a lot of people? Because I had that problem on the same day I tried to open Steam even though there weren't any problems yesterday? I also went for a quick rundown of the forums and it reveals that an observable number of people also had this problem.

Can't say I have. Steam hasn't bugged up in the past 10 years for me. I'm sure this is the the same for the vast majority because otherwise we'd be seeing a lot of topics on the matter.

Steam has over 37 million active at peak and if just 0.1% of them decided to post about it we'd be swarming in topics.