Stop Steam from launching when pressing the Guide button

How to make the Guide button on your Xbox controllers not launch Steam and Steam Big-Picture. Freeing it up to be rebound in an app such as Controller Companion.

Introduction

If you have disabled the Windows 10 GameBar shortcut then you'll discover that Steam always responds to pressing the Guide button and there is no way to disable it.

In this guide we'll disable the Guide button by using Xbox 360 Controller Emulator (x360ce) for the Steam executable.

Installing x360ce

The first step of this guide is to install x360ce for Steam.

Go to: http://www.x360ce.com/ and download the 32bit version.

Once downloaded, extract it to your Steam installation folder
(Usually: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam)

Configuring x360ce

Now launch your x360ce.exe in your Steam installation folder.

Once you do, you'll get this warning:



Press Create.

At this point make sure you have your controller connected and turned on, you should get a popup like this one:



Allow the app to search for a profile for you and it will setup your control bindings. This will allow you to continue using the controller in Steam Big-Picture.

Now you need to make sure the Guide button is not mapped:



Press the Save button and close the window.

Renaming XInput1_3.dll

Before Steam will use this profile, you have to rename the XInput1_3.dll to XInput1_4.dll.

Final Step

Exit Steam and start it again.

What does this actually do?

x360ce is usually used to allow us to use our non-XInput controllers with XInput only games. It does that by providing a different XInput dll file for the game or program to load.

This custom dll file loads the x360ce.ini file found in the same folder after having run x360ce.exe.

The ini file contains information about how to map a controller to look like an Xbox 360 controller for the game or program that loaded the custom dll file.

It turns out this works even for Xbox 360 Controllers, so we use that to map the Guide button to do nothing. That way Steam never "sees" us pressing the Guide button.

[Terrybull]

all i do to stop it launching is i launch controller companion and then i just turn steam off and then it doesnt launch this works for me as i use that button for push to talk on rdo

[Kabliga]

this no longer works, as an fyi

[VeGas GhOst]

confirmed working for ps2 and ps3 controllers, used to use this all the time before i found the SCPtoolkit driver for PS3/DS4 controllers

[CtrlAltCuteness]

Inimigor
I would assume the website is still there (especially because I just checked). If it never seems to be available, it can be one or more reasons:
• You are using a proxy that blocks it (many schools & workplaces have websites on a block list for various reasons)
• They blocked the address that you are sending from (which would instead be the proxy, Tor endpoint, etc. if you are using them)
• You have the website blocked by something on your computer (the DNS server you are using is not going to it, you have a HOSTS file that manually changed it, an adblocker or other software blocked the site)
• The server is down temporarily due to various reasons
• Or something else

The website is still at this location:
http://www.x360ce.com

[CtrlAltCuteness]

HyperX Alpha
If you can normally use that controller & wireless dongle combination AND have your computer correctly recognize it successfully, it might work, yet as I don't have either, (and no working computer... also I don't want to boot a very dusty, obsolete, Linux computer,) I can only give a guess (and the tips I just gave you here).

[HyperXAlpha]

so im curious would you be able to use a xbox1 controller with this an run it off the 360 wireless dongle

[Inimigor]

Is there anywhere I can still download the software for solving this issue?

[CtrlAltCuteness]

Also note that some anti- [blah] may flag x360ce (even the legit one) because of how it works (remapping the controllers)... and yet some anti- [blah] flag any "not known yet in its online database" programs (those are always ones avoided by programmers as they have a near 100% chance to flag their freshly-made, 100%-virus-free programs).

[CtrlAltCuteness]

For those claiming that they don't have the files in their Steam folder, I need to mention that you failed on reading the part of extracting x360ce's contents into your Steam folder. You may also have not run that exact x360ce from that folder.

If you had it extract the archive into a folder within Steam's folder, or if your Steam's main install location is not the default, you need to put it in the correct location.
Defaults:
32-bit OS: C:\Program Files\Steam
64-bit OS: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam

[Howl]

yeah does this work for the Xbox One controller? :o