Sadly, I have been offline so long, that the total downloads for "Steam,HL2 & Vid Drivers" is astronomical for a 56k user. I cannot even test your theories yet due to the massive amount of info being transfered to me.

I will update you all on my insights when I am able.

Thanks for your time.

Me neither :$. You could get someone to maybe send you a cd of the gcf's if you really need to update?

The good news is, my Steam now acknowledges "Offline Mode"

The bad news, My HL2 refuses to load. It gives no error messages, it simple fails to load.

Subsequently, my Hammer editor now claims "No textures present"

Any clues?

I made most of my snarkmarks by answering Editing questions, Dickenstien. You would probably search for "no textures."or something... Dude, it may not be there, i dont know.

anyway, I don't think offline mode would do anything to your textures. I run in offline all the time and it still gives me my textures...

First and foremost, I would like to apologize for my poor handling of this situation between Nickel and myself. You must understand, I have a very limited time frame to play on my computer so any disruption is aggravating. Second, you must also understand that I am very self reliant on my own skills at solving problems. I had indeed searched countless threads prior to the poor advice I received to "Search".... Thirdly, the issue couldn't have been solved by anyone here because you did not have all the variables, for that matter neither had I. The solution was simple once I knew them all and I will explain them in a moment. Be aware that I do not ask for assistance often, nor easily. It is my practice to exhaust all other sources before crying for help. I would like to say however that since this was my first crisis, Snarkpit as a whole handled it poorly, but as I stated, even if anyone tried to help, it would have amounted to nothing. Now on to the solution.

1: Be absolutely certain that YOU are the only individual working on a problem when attempting to resolve an issue. As it turned out, my son was trying to help, without my knowledge and we were essentially messing things up worse.

2: I have 56k. (groans repeatedly) It was taking me literally hours to update. I had the update set to "Load game upon completion" or whatever it says when you check the little box. Apparently it finished while I was away and my son took over.

3: Upon loading Steam, there was a pop up message stating that my video drivers were out of date as well. My son obliged me by downloading the new drivers. What he is not aware of is, you MUST uninstall the previous drivers BEFORE installing the new ones. There was apparently a driver conflict and neither the game nor the editor would load due to the lack of a proper driver setting. In spite of the fact that no messages popped up, this was indeed the problem.

4: After uninstalling the old and reinstalling the new drivers, both work perfectly again.

Again, I apologize for my poor handling. I was distressed, and my only advice seemed to be an insult to my already extra-ordinary attempts at utilizing the search option. The search option BTW sucks ass. There simply was to many variables to sift through, AND not knowing the real problem didn't help matters any.

Thanks for your time.