Online games won't load

I have another problem, which started about a week ago.

I've had Starcraft 2 installed for a while, and recently was 'gifted' Left 4 Dead 2 through a Steam account, which I played a couple times with no problems.

For a few days now, neither of the 2 games will load. The Starcraft 2 update screen comes up, and it says that certain updates are being installed, but they don't actually install, and nothing happens.

Left 4 Dead 2 won't load either. I'm in the Steam account, and press 'Play'. A box comes up that says "Preparing to launch Left 4 Dead 2", it dissappears, and nothing happens.

With both of these games, after I've tried and failed to launch the game, if I go into task manager and look at processes, it will say Starcraft2.exe or Left4Dead2.exe is running, like they're running as background processes or something. If I try to press 'Play' Left 4 Dead 2 again, it alerts me that only 1 instance of Left 4 Dead 2 can run at a time.

Additional Info
I've tried running non-online games (Tomb Raider Underworld, Caesar IV) and they load up fine.

I've reinstalled Starcraft 2 but that didn't help.

EDIT: Running Vista


Again, I don't expect anyone to spend a long time looking into this. I'm just wondering if anyone happens to know what the problem likely is. Thanks for reading.

Have you installed a new firewall or anti virus program recently? That is the first thing I would check if suddenly online games had a problem.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Alric

Have you installed a new firewall or anti virus program recently? That is the first thing I would check if suddenly online games had a problem.

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No, I haven't. (In fact I just checked and my firewall is turned off. It must have been like that for a long time. Just turned it on.)

Well I have steam too, but I never go into steam to run the games. Instead after the games are installed, I just go to the game itself instead of through steam. I am not sure if there is any difference, but you can try that.

You can also try reinstalling steam itself, and not just the games. In case it is some weird bug with steam.

But the Starcraft II one is a CD, not through steam, and it seems the problems are related.

If your computer has been making restore points, you can try a system restore from before the problem occurred. It might be a virus, or some recently installed program is messing with it. Other than that, whatever is wrong is beyond me. Obviously your internet is working fine since you are here. My only guess would be something is blocking the port that the games connect to while online, but I don't know much about that sort of thing. Usually you either were screwing around your internet options, or your using a firewall, and in cases like that it is much easier to figure out what happened. However when that isn't the case, its hard to figure out what happened.

Finally, my computer is okay. I uninstalled all programs in the add\remove programs list that looked like I didn't need. After restarting my computer everything was fine.