I understand that operating systems crash.  This happens, I know.  However, the frequency in which my Windows installation crashes is just sad.  This usually only causes annoyance when it crashes in the middle of a game.  I can deal with that.  However, when I am updating an application, such as, I don’t know….Left 4 Dead and Windows crashes, I have 30 minutes of pain, and an hour+ of waiting.  I assumed that steam would do like it does when it installs a game.  If you shut down the system, it pauses the download, and then resumes it.  But when my system crashed it ate the update, and it wouldn’t launch.

Then I tried to remove and then reinstall via steam.  This failed.  Then I tried to remove the game files.  This failed.  After seaching I found a page that talked about removing the client blob file.  That failed.  I eventually had to remove all the files but the steam.exe and the steamApps folder.  But I did have to remove any files that talked about L4D.

So, after about 1 hour of downloading I should have a ready to play game.  Sigh.  If only the other peices, like the game verification, game removal or update worked I would have this hassle.