Hammer not responding

Hi, Just tried to load Hammer and Steam
wanted to update so I let it and a few mins later it said it was ready
to play. But since that small update Hammer has failed to boot up
properly. It lets me go through Steam, Play Games, Source SDK but when
I click on hammer Editor it boots up the Hammer Window and then my CPU
usage shoots to 100 and no matter how long I leave it, it will not
finish booting up. If I try and click on anything then it says (not
responding) in the title bar...

I also have a strange blank 'Messages' window that appears along the whole
length of the Hmmer Window at the bottom of the screen, never seen that
before

I have also tried launching it from the hammer.exe but the same thing happens.

What has hppened to my Hammer?

Thanks for your time

have you ran hl2/HL2DM/CS (whatever your making a map for) since your last update? If you have not try running that application again. (you have to generaly run the application after every update). If you have ran the application try reinstalling the application accourding to valves tutorial on it. If that still fails to work then maybe your system spects are to low.

Have yo closed steam down then re-started it? I always do that after any update. You may also try "resetting game configs".

Yeah I pretty much tried everything in the end, cheers guys...

I eventually lugged my tower down to work and re-installed the whole SDK, seems to be running fine now.

Very strange behaviour, very strange indeed...

How much RAM did you have on that other system? Hammer is a terrible memory hog, coupled with windows itself hogging memory, it is possible (unlikely but possible) that you hit the swap file just trying to load the editor. Though it seems like you wouldnt be using 100% cpu then, you would be using little cpu with your hdd spinning off the hook. But to hit the swap file just to load hammer you would probably have to have like 128 MB of RAM. If you have 128 MB RAM your computer is probably too weak to run hammer anyways.

I have a Gig of RAM, an AMD 3000 64-bit processor and a 5900XT.... surely adequate enough to run Hammer

But anyways, all is solved, I reinstalled! Thanks anyways.