Just wondering, as there are a lot of hard-core gamers on here, whether anyone else is having problems with any Steam games, but in particular MW2 and MW3.

I have been playing the whole series from 1 to 3 and am about half way through 2 when it stopped working with the error- Could not load image 'Gamefonts.pc'

Easy to find lots of information on this error, but not much help. A lot of people have found it best to rename certain local files from .....German..... to .....English..... for example, but mine ARE English and therefore useless.

Another suggestion was to download a copy of the MP executable, but I only play and am only having problems with the SP game.

I ended up with a reinstall and a 19 hour download!! on Thursday into Friday.

NOW, I try to play and the effin thing says Could not load "localisation.txt"

Replacing this file can result in more errors messages and when I validated my local files, 34 failed and I am now at the start of ANOTHER multi GB download. FFS!!!!!!

I have only got 2-3Mb speed download at best and this is really [LIFTED] me off. It seems that these problems have also appeared in MW3, so I am apprehensive about that.

The best or worst part about this is that I am seeing Web references for this error going back to the beginning of LAST year and although I have frequently played this game, it is only now that I am having problems and no-one has apparently sorted it out.

If at all possible, I might be trying to avoid Steam powered games from now on.

Ever since installing Steam, my computer takes frikkin ages to go from log on screen to usable desktop. That's longer than it takes to boot up to the log on screen.

Verifying the integrity of local files would be my suggestion, but you've already done it.

Are you using Vista? From boot to usable desktop for me takes at least three minutes, but tbh I got fed up of timing ages ago and I normally put it in hibernation.

I shut it down the other day and it must have taken at least twice as long as a complete XP restart.

I'd never associated any particular problems with the Steam program though.

I have backed up the entire Steam folder to another drive- all 43GB of it. It's a good job that storage is so cheap these days.

Nope Win7 and a decent lappy (think it scores 7 on everything except HDD which scores 5).

I have no experience of Win 7 yet. I know that Vista is quite quick when first installed, but no matter how much I try to keep running services and progs to a minimum, as things are installed it gets slower and slower. In the region of 3-4 minutes to usable desktop atm and that's on an i7 machine with Vista 64 bit and 3GB of RAM.

And as for hard drive storage being cheap- have you heard of the damage to hard drive motor factories due to flooding? There is apparently a big shortage of drives and prices for HDDs have at least doubled in some cases Might be at least well into next year before things get back on track.

http://hothardware.com/News/Brace-Yours ... is-Coming/