Steam broken - need help

[Omaeka]

Steam has been an absolute nightmare for a few days now, it's locking up and forcing me to end process almost constantly. It almost always becomes (not responding) whenever I try and log in to the point I can almost never access Steam now. I'd ask Steam support but they're useless from the times I've used them, always give some generic response not even related to my issue.

I think this calls for a reinstall of Steam but last time I did that I completely naffed it all up and had to re-identify my steamapps/common games which took ages. Anyone know a fast, painless way of reinstalling it? Thanks!

 

[Omaeka]

I've done what Valve suggested and deleted everything except steamapps/common and Steam.exe and let it reupdate itself with all the core Steam files and it's worked. a lot of things have screwed up, Skyrim had to redownload 10GB at 50kbs - got to 60MB then shot up complete, so was just updating before revalidating, was scary.

Now I just gotta convert a few games to 'a new, more efficient format' (which I did before reinstalling Steam) and it should be done, all works no more lock ups. Mods can lock and let this die, least there is a fix for this issue in the search on here now.