As some of you may already know, Osama had some problems running Steam under Windows Vista.  He was frustrated and gave up on fixing it. I went over to his house a couple of nights ago and decided to take a look at this Steam problem. I use XP myself and haven’t experienced any problems with Steam before. After doing research on Google, a little experimenting and gulping down some tasty macaroons his wife made, I am happy to say I was able to solve his Steam problem. =)

The problem lies within Vista’s registry security settings. I am writing this from memory (I don’t have Vista myself). Here’s how to fix it:

1. Using Vista’s start menu, type “regedit” in the run field to start the registry editor.
2. Browse to the “HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\steam” key. If you are having the problem you will notice that you aren’t able to view the key content
3. Right click on the “steam” key and click on “permissions…”.
4. You will notice that no user is listed under “Allowed users”. Add the following users/group and give them full access:  Administrators (group), System (user) and your own user name.
5. If you press Ok, it may complain that you are not the owner and aren’t allowed to do this. In this case simply click on Advanced and add the above users as owners and try step 4 again. I only added System as owner and that did it. (You may need to close the permissions window and reopen after assigning owners)
6. That’s it! You now should be able to see the content of the key but it may be empty. In this case re-install steam and you should be good to go.

Again, I am doing this from memory so my descriptions may not be exact, but hopefully it’ll be close enough to get the job done. =)