How to Fix Rare Steam Update Crash

[Apt. 2B]

Alright, I've had this issue a least 3 times. It occurs when STEAM does an update using that old ghetto green progress bar (the one seen in someone's sig). The progress bar will reach a certain percent, hang for a moment then give you an error looking like this "Steam.exe (main exception): ERROR:delete of Steam.exe failed, Win32 Error 5 "Access is Denied"" if you try to launch STEAM again it will repeat this failure.

 

The way to fix this is pretty easy, but you gotta be quick.

First, you need to open your task manager (ctrl+alt+delete(derp)), go to your processes tab, organize them by alphebetical order, then scroll down to where STEAM would appear. Launch STEAM, you should see STEAM.exe appear in your process list. It will again, start to progress to the point where it hangs. At some point near then, you should see STEAMTmp.exe pop up below STEAM.exe. The moment this occurs kill the original STEAM.exe with the end process button. STEAMTmp.exe will then close by itself and continue running as STEAM.exe - from this point on your update should successfully complete without you having to do anything else.

 

This is a rare error, but I'm not the only one who has had this problem, and I know how frustrating it is when you can't find the solution online, so I just thought it couldn't hurt to share this.

[Cr(+)sshair]

Maybe right-click Steam.exe and tag "Run as admin" will fix it?

[bort]

i have not had that problem myself but i bet it has to do with UAC. anyways thanks for the tut. good to know

[Lt. Awesome]

I havn't had that problem..yet, but thanks for alerting me on what to do

 

 

 

 

 

 

and i like your sig