Muzman on 18/6/2010 at 04:14
Yeah, there's probably better places to ask this but I can't make head nor tail of their help search.
There's been so many updates these past weeks, for steam and the valve games, some of which broke as much as they fixed (notably, Face poser right when I was working out how to use it. geez I hate auto updates) I can't tell what might've caused this.
But at some point the steam store/front page broke and won't come back. All I get is 'unable to connect- your proxy may be broken or you're not connected to the internet' messages. Downloading and so forth seems to work fine. This is true no matter what download region I choose.
I can't find anything in their help about this. I'm wondering if its something to do with steam using Internet Explorer as a back end (or so I hear). Recently some malware was wreaking havok on my machine but somehow thought IE was the default browser (which saved me a lot of trouble) and since then Windows still thinks it is despite me using Firefox exclusively.
It's pretty thin but it's the only thing I can think of since Steam doesn't show a lot of options to play with that might tell me more.
Any thoughts?
Renzatic on 18/6/2010 at 06:52
I'm thinking Steam isn't your problem here. It sounds more like you've still got some malware crap lingering about,
Right now the best I can do is suggest you check your TCP/IP settings to see if your DNS settings are set up the way they should be. If things look normal there, you might have to go through the really extremely indepth system cleaning gamut. Turn off system restore, boot into safe mode, then run Hijack This, Malwarebytes, Superantimalware, your antivirus, and all the other usual suggested scanners.
Muzman on 18/6/2010 at 07:07
What should DNS settings look like? (s'pose that's a check with ISP thing?). Also, wouldn't anything that fundamental affect other things besides Steam? Currently Firefox, Bittorrent, Windows update etc are all fine (or work well enough that I can't see anything wrong).
Muzman on 18/6/2010 at 07:20
Haha victory.
Further investigation revealed the malware thingy had left proxy info in IE (presumably as a way of breaking/hijacking it and generally pissing you off. Unfortunately for it, IE was a decoy. It takes the hit while me and Firefox mount a counter attack).
I couldn't quite believe that Steam was so lamely dependant on IE's settings. I also can't quite believe my initial reasoning was exactly right. I'm going to go and be drunk with power for a while.
Hit Deity on 19/6/2010 at 02:54
Quote Posted by Muzman
I couldn't quite believe that Steam was so lamely dependant on IE's settings. I also can't quite believe my initial reasoning was exactly right. I'm going to go and be drunk with power for a while.
Maybe because IE is such an integral part of Windows now...Steam can't help but be heavily dependent on it. Maybe. Just a guess.
Muzman on 20/6/2010 at 04:37
Silence worm!
(still hasn't worn off)
ZylonBane on 20/6/2010 at 12:46
But... the new Steam client doesn't even use IE as its embedded browser anymore. It uses WebKit.
Muzman on 20/6/2010 at 18:55
Interesting.
I definitely loaded up IE and changed its proxy settings (removed them really), then ran Steam immediately after and it was working again. That was enough Q.E. for my D. The steam client was already up to date by that point. Maybe it still uses IE's proxies and networking biz?
ZylonBane on 20/6/2010 at 19:10
When you go into Internet Options from IE, it actually brings up the Internet Options control panel, which is system-global. For reasons unknown, Firefox chooses to maintain its own private proxy configuration instead of using the global one.
