Aver: I have problem with Steam. From time to time it insists that game that I've installed and played already, is not really installed when I'm trying to launch it. It's rare, but it's extremely annoying when it happens. I always check if games files are really on HD and they always are, but it seems that Steam can't see them. Sometimes restarting Steam helps, but sometimes not and then I'm forced to reinstall whole game which takes 45min - 1h of time and if it was prearranged multiplayer game session with friends, then it forces us to cancel it, so it's a big deal for me. Yesterday it also happened to my friend, so it seems that it's not a problem with my PC.
Anyone knows how to fix it? I've tried to contact Steam support, but after they sent me few 'basic' answers, they stopped replying to me.
Some months ago I managed to get in touch with a real, live, competent Valve rep via email who wasn't just re-pasting stuff from their FAQ. Your problem sounds a little like the one I had, so I'll offer the answer I was given:
A good while ago, Steam began to change the way their games are stored on your computer. It's considered an optimization, and the client generally can compress your files and download what's necessary without you being very aware of it. There are some cases where the Steam client can't, and those cases seem to be less about what you're running as a user, and more about how the various hops getting traffic to you manage that traffic.
The answer made sense given where I was at the time and how awful my internet connectivity was. It's strange to me that near two years after they started their file format change that games are still throwing up all over everything, but it's somewhat plausible. The fix for me was to just suck it up and remove and reinstall the games I really wanted to play. But if I had it to do over again, I'd back up the game data locally, remove the game from the steam client, restart the computer (and also thus the Steam client), and recover the game data in the hopes of not having to redownload the whole mess. If you've got good broadband, though, you could set it to run overnight and it wouldn't be a problem.