steam_logo.jpgHonestly, if you hire someone for a technical support position, shouldn’t you make sure they know about the product they’re supposed to be supporting? I worked as a technical support agent in the past, so I do know it’s a hard job. I appreciate that most of your clients are old techno-phobic half-blind dumb people who would need instructions to plug in a power cord. I appreciate that, but that is not me.

My problem is probably caused by Vista (which I hate but which came with my PC) and it’s my fault that I never got around to installing a dual-boot with another OS on this system, I understand that, but Steam claims to be Vista compatible, so it should be! My problem is that I can’t purchase anything from within the steam store. Clicking on the purchase button does absolutely nothing. When I try to open the link in a browser instead, I get “steam://purchase/38 is not a recognized protocol” as an error. In IE, it gives me a generic “this page cannot be displayed” error.

I reinstalled steam 6-7 times and it doesn’t work. Ran as admin and not, same thing. Ran with and without backwords compatibility, same. Searching for “steam://purchase/38 is not a recognized protocol” in google and yahoo produces less than a page of results with suggestions that didn’t work. After trying all that, I e-mail tech support. 3 days later (I kid you not) they sent me a link to the knowledge base with a few things to try. All were simple and generic and, most importantly, they didn’t help. I e-mail the same guy back, what did he do? He e-mailed me the same friggin link again! Now I’m getting peeved.

After I calmly and politely explained that I’ve already tried all those steps, he asked me to reinstall Steam. I explained that I had done that both before and after his “helpful” link advised me to do so. Then he asked me to lower my IE security settings. I realized that he was now just reading me the steps from the link he had already sent me twice! What a friggin bonehead!

Anyway, I’m waiting for his response. If I don’t get something that will actually help me fix this issue, I’m taking my business elsewhere. Actually, I really want steam so after I calm down I’ll probably just install another OS and re-download steam.

Anyone out there in Cyber-Space have any advice for me?

UPDATE: Click here for the fix!