Steam and Windows 7
by Grimblast on Nov.03, 2009, under Gaming, Geekdom, note to self
With my reinstallation of Windows 7 and Steam I started to encounter a silly problem. When I would try to run Steam it was trying to say that:
Running Steam in Windows compatibility mode is not recommended. Please remove any Windows compatibility settings for all users under file properties for Steam.exe and restart Steam. Press ‘Cancel’ to premanently ignore this warning and continue.
I checked my properties and found out that I wasn’t running in compatibility mode and yet Windows believed I was. I did some searching on the internet and one of the first few hits I got had the answer to this little dilemma. The site was slow to come up for me but it had what I was looking for. Apparently, there is a registry entry involved which causes this to happen. I’ll quote that site in the event they disappear or just don’t load up in a timely fashion.
To fix the issue:
- Hit start->run->regedit
- Go to key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers
- Look for a entry with your path to steam.exe
- Delete that entry
- If you dont find it there try HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers
Hope this helps out any that encounter this particular issue. As always, if you poke around in your registry and don’t know what you’re doing, I take no responsibility for your breaking of things.
November 21st, 2009 on 11:38 pm
That’s weird. Any idea what caused it? I vaguely recall having an odd issue with my installation of Steam (it crashed, IIRC) but then it disappeared after an update.
November 23rd, 2009 on 3:54 pm
It was odd to say the least. I did restore backups of my games this time around and it might’ve had a hand in the problem. What was strange is I could click out of the error window and use Steam just fine. It was more of a nuisance than anything else.
December 4th, 2009 on 12:18 pm
I take back what I said in an earlier post. I started up Steam again for the first time in about a week or two (on the 1st of Dec.) and then it gave a compatibility warning completely out of the blue. I’m wondering if a Steam update must’ve changed something.
I did some research real fast and turned up this link on MSDN. It’s definitely a Steam issue, but I find it odd that it’d start well after installation…
(I clicked “cancel” on the elevation dialog to ignore future messages and Steam still seems to work fine. This was just flat out strange. Now, if only there were a fix to stop Steam from constantly stealing focus!)