Cannot Contact Steam Network

Jeff Atwood has some strange hobbies that include (but are not limited to) giving away games. Fortunately I was on receiving end of latest giveaway. Condition was good score on one or more trilogy sites and steam account.

Installation of steam client wen’t without issues but program would not start. It would just give standard non-descriptive message “Cannot contact steam network”. For troubleshooting purposes I tested it in Windows XP Mode and everything worked there. That confirmed that compatibility with my Windows 7 (64-bit) is issue here.

Solution was annoyingly simple. I went into properties for Steam and checked “Run this program in compatibility mode” check-box. I opted for Windows XP compatibility (default) and started it again. Update went without hitch.

After update I got nasty message from Windows telling me that I should consider removing compatibility settings. Once I removed compatibility application continued to work but my download rate went to 0.0 KB/s. Going against all warnings I reactivated Windows XP compatibility and everything was good once more.