TF2 and CSS Problems

[Minimoose]

When I start the games they both come up with the steam launching message then once it dissapears to load the game I get the 'hl2.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close message'. I looked at the data report and it says the problem is to do with shaderapidx9.dll, which I found in the bin folders of both CSS and TF2 and also HL2, so to see if they were all problematic I started up HL2... It worked.

So then I had the clever idea of replacing the TF2 one (I made sure I had a copy of the original) with the HL2 one to test it, but I get the same error.

Oh yes, and the obvious reason why this happened is due to me installing XP SP3 from SP2, as soon as I've done that this error happens to occur :/ I don't see why this would do anything to it though.

I could try reinstalling them but I'd have to re-download the games and I can't be bothered to do that (well not until I've exhausted every option), I have looked on the steam support page about it and nothing has helped. Happy to provide any other information you need if you can help me.

These are really the only games I play so I would really like to get them working again.

[tman11580]

  Minimoose said:

When I start the games they both come up with the steam launching message then once it dissapears to load the game I get the 'hl2.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close message'. I looked at the data report and it says the problem is to do with shaderapidx9.dll, which I found in the bin folders of both CSS and TF2 and also HL2, so to see if they were all problematic I started up HL2... It worked.

So then I had the clever idea of replacing the TF2 one (I made sure I had a copy of the original) with the HL2 one to test it, but I get the same error.

Oh yes, and the obvious reason why this happened is due to me installing XP SP3 from SP2, as soon as I've done that this error happens to occur :/ I don't see why this would do anything to it though.

I could try reinstalling them but I'd have to re-download the games and I can't be bothered to do that (well not until I've exhausted every option), I have looked on the steam support page about it and nothing has helped. Happy to provide any other information you need if you can help me.

These are really the only games I play so I would really like to get them working again.

Reinstall..that should do it, all the time that its going to take looking for a solution, you could just reinstall..when ever i have a problem i reinstall, and it still doesnt work, uninstall steam than reinstall everything

[Minimoose]

Problem is I want to make sure it works, I don't want to re download everything, reinstall it all then find out that I would have to do a fresh install of windows :s (I Have a very annoying virus that I can't get rid of and it might be doing things to **** my windows installation, I just never bothered to reinstall once I got it as it didn't make an impact on my system performance.)

Thanks for the quick reply.

[Athernar]

Navigate to /steam/steamapps/youraccountname/ and delete all the files in there.

Then load up HL2/CSS/TF2 and steam will extract a brand new copy of the game files to the above folder from the game cache files (GCFs), if you get the same error then all i can suggest is making sure all your drivers are up to date.

[Denis W. Veteran]

This is a really weird idea, but besides doing a clean install of your video card drivers, also download the DirectX August 2008 redistributable and install it.

[Minimoose]

Thanks for the replies, can't tell you how much I appreciate this. I'm downloading the new drivers and then I'll try to make it extract from the cache files, hopefully that will work.

EDIT: Nothing has worked, so I will have to do a fresh install I'm guessing, if that doesn't work I'll have to completely reinstall windows and just leave SP3 as that's the thing which triggered this :( Need to anyway, get rid of the bloody virus.

Edited September 14, 2008 by Minimoose