Update on Half Life 2

I uninstalled Half Life 2 and then reinstalled it, to see if that fixes the problem. It didn't. When I start a new game it still says "A.I. Disabled..." I suspect that the uninstall didn't remove all Half Life 2 files (and thus not all the settings) and so will attempt another uninstall.

However, I wanted to share some other interesting things:

A friend of mine has "The Orange Box" as well, and his version of Half Life 2 works just fine. He is running Windows XP Media Edition. While I am attempting to run Half Life 2 on Windows Vista.

His Steam program/browser works just fine.

My Steam program/browser constantly tells me I need to install the latest version of Flash Player even though I already have it installed and Flash works just fine for me in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, and the same Steam page loads just fine in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

I also learned that "The Pirated Copies" of Half Life 2 have the same problems with the A.I. that I'm having.

This leads me to believe the problem lies in Vista & Steam not working well together. I'm starting to suspect the A.I. Disabled thing is some part of Valve's copy protection (if the game doesn't call home or something, the A.I. shuts down so people can't play: Which makes sense.). If that's the case, then Half Life 2 not being written for Vista and Vista blocking some sort of communications or something coming out of Half Life 2 (or going to Half Life 2) is causing the A.I. to shut down, then that might be my problem.

In any case, I wrote Valve's support (Steam Engine) requesting that they patch their program. So far I've gotten no response back. This may be another case of copy protection screwing the legitimate purchasers, where the crackers find ways around it (though not always).

I might have to start looking into seeing if the crackers managed to get around the problem in their cracked versions.

Until next time, I'll be fooling around...