Yep! That's right! You heard well.
Have you ever tried joining a server and while precaching, the game just closes for no reason? This bug is a pain in the ass, and after about three days of gaming with h!gh, I pinpointed the problem.

Internet Explorer 7 Beta has no support for older gaming. It's weird to think that IE has anything to do with browsing servers, but it has more power in gaming apps than you think. In your Steam folder, there are a few files for server listings, etc. These files are read by none other than IE itself. Beta 7 is not as compatible with these file extensions for Steam games. The number one reason why, is that fact that it IS still in beta testing. SO, in order to fix this bug, we've got to remove IE7 and revert to IE6.0. Here are the steps to do it:

Start
Settings
Control Panel
Add/Remove Programs
Click the "Add/Remove Windows Components" button on the side
Uncheck Internet Explorer

When IE has finished uninstalling, go back to the same panel and place a checkmark BACK into IE to reinstall it.

The reason we do this is to ensure that we have a clean IE6 ready for us when we reboot, because no one wants to find out later that it was unsuccessful.

Once finished with this, go back to the "Add/Remove Programs" button, locate "Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta 3" and click the remove button. Once it has finished uninstalling, a prompt will appear to restart your computer. Click "No".

Now we will verify that IE7 has been uninstalled. Locate the shortcut to Internet Explorer, and open it. If an error comes up stating "The application failed to initialize properly (0x0000022).", then IE7 has been successfully uninstalled. If not, and IE7 opens back up, you made a mistake in the uninstall, and you will need to go back and repeat the removal steps. Once you have receieved this error, you can restart your machine, and The Steam bug will be gone for good. Although IE7 is cool, it's gay when you can't play in certain servers. This bug does not apply
to Mozilla Firefox or Opera users. This bug only affects users with Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 installed. If you enjoy the tabbed browsing, I highly reccommend Mozilla Firefox for windows, and Opera for Linux users. (Though I highly doubt anyone is using Linux, while playing Steam games.)

Problem solved. Have fun playing Steam games without crashing!
aCId_rAIn to the rescue one more gin'.
Any questions or other issues about this problem you may direct to me if you like, so I can assist you with them.

Steampowered.com - old news

If you're not having the problem, you probably should'nt reply to the thread unless it helps the other users. So on another note, Yeah, h!gh and I checked that place, and here's what we both got...searching for the following keywords (some combined)

Steam bug, half-life bug, Condition Zero bug, Condition Zero precache bug, crash bug, precaching bug, game closes after precache, and many more.

All results except one returned zero.
"game closes after precache" returned 3 results in which all were redirected to one post.

In addition to the one search result, none of them had been answered by any steam mod, or tech support member. The closest answer/fix to the problem was from a user that stated it was a Video Card issue, and people were supposed to revert Direct X down, or revert their ATI Catalyst, or NVIDIA drivers to the latest/previous version, which, of course DID NOT/DOES NOT work. It wasn't listed here on the forums for other users to easily get to, with a non-helpful alternative such as to search the steampowered forums for no answers to the problem, so here it is.

Thats why you shouldn't use IE use firefox

haha poor acid rain, no one is praising his work.



:P

GJ!

Good work bro,i dont have this problem but maybe it will help someone.And all you smart asses should try being helpful once in a while.

www.firefoxmyths.com

lol tabbed browsing without having to dl third party plug-ins for the win.

Well, if you were using firefox, you wouldn't be affected because you wouldn't have upgraded IE.

The problem lies in Microsoft's insisting on integrating the browser into the OS.

Well most of it has to do with the fact that it's still in beta testing. Later on, I'm pretty sure the problem will have been fixed, but until then, it's back to IE6 for me. I choose not to use Firefox, because I hate the download manager, and I think there's poor coding into it. It takes much more time to load, and that bothers me too. The main problem lies within the server files inside of Steam. There are files inside Steam that have extensions such as .BLOB, and a few others. These files are read/written from IE believe it or not, and the fact that there's a few bugs within IE7 B3 doesn't allow access to write fully to these files, and update them. IE is definately tied in to EVERYONE's OS. CTRL+ALT+DEL, and look for explorer.exe. This is the root of Internet Explorer, and the windows shell that lets you browse through your hard drive. Same thing applies when you browse to c:/ drive, and type google.com into the address bar, and you can actually access the page. The moral of the story, is beta testing is beta testing for a reason, and you shouldn't mess with a beta product unless it doesn't affect you. Thanks everyone for taking a look at this, and I hope you will enjoy a working Steam after uninstalling.

Wowzerz Opera is nice i like the interface at the top.

ya dawg i figured that junk out weeks ago haha.

i just went to the steam forums. Looked around a bit and vooillla! I win!