Install Woes

This is getting annoying. I received the game during Christmas and finally got around to installing it - which took almost an hour (no idea why so slow). Then it makes me set up some kind of Steam account. Okeyfine. Then, before I can play the game, it has to decrypt the files through Steam. Okeyfine. It locks at 21% and will not progress any further. Hmm, maybe a reset will help. So I reset, and now my system sound is HORRIBLE. Nothing sounds right on my computer. Ok, this has happened before, If I do a rollback, my sound usually ends up working right again. So I do - to March!

Sound is fine, but registry isn't too happy - a few programs need to be updated again, and many unistalled programs are now showing back up in the add/remove directory. But at least the sound is good again.

So I do my maintenance on my existing system. I then go back to installing HL. Only to get some error message saying that it can only be installed in a Steam directory. So I make a Steam directory. No joy, still says it needs to be installed in a Steam directory.

Anyone have any tips for getting this game to actually work?

What's painfully annoying about this process is this is about the only game I actually paid for (or was given) - the rest were... demo's. Are all "non-enhanced" retail games like this???

Clay,

You'll probably find some help at the Steam forums (www.steampowered.com). The retail CD for Half Life 2 did not work correctly in many cases, and they did release fixes of some kind. I think Valve and Vivendi did not work together very well to deliver the CD install version. There's some bad blood there.

Below is a link to the Steam forum posts about the retail CD version.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forum...hreadid=182355

Thanks. I got it installed now, looks like I needed to install the Steam files first.