Half-Life Fallout: Steam freezing - Half-Life Fallout

Ok, so I looked around these forums to find the best place to put this topic. I wasn't sure if this would be ok, so if it isn't, mods feel free to move it.

I was wantin to do some summer shoppin, and opened up my steam today to see that well... it wouldn't open. I tried to trouble shoot the program to see what I could figure out and it just told me that the application was failing. I went to my processes to see if it was running, which it was, so I killed it and reset it. It opened, but only to freeze shortly afterwards. I remember seeing something say that if I didn't close a file that it would create some interference. This was the first time hearing of this. Steam has been very laggy and freezing often. If anyone has any tips or advice I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

Hmm if you don't have many games installed maybe the best thing to do would be to uninstall it and install it again since you said it was getting pretty laggy for you.

Ya I may do that. I only have 5 games. Probably would be the best route to take, I just wanted to avoid that if I could lol. I just know that there is something creating interference with steam, would reinstalling it fix this?

I would think that would be the best way to fix any steam weirdness, have you installed any mods or things that could have been put in a wrong folder. I'm no expert on this but if it were me I'd probably just reinstall it. If you can get steam to stay open you can back up your games before you do that so you don't have to download them again.

How do you back them up? I'm currently installing a game so after that I will uninstall it and give it a go.

In one of the menu options there is an option to 'backup and restore games' not sure what menu its under because I'm on my mac but its under account in OSX might be in 'file' for windows.

You could also copy the game-files and -folders out of their steam directory (steam\steamapps\), copy them back in after reinstalling and preform an integrity check on the game files. This way you don't need to download everything again.