Steam – getting «delete of Steam.exe failed, Win32 Error 5 “Access is denied”»

This is caused by a component of Steam not stopping correctly, and then when you try and reopen Steam it complains.

Open a terminal window and run the following command (type it in and press enter):

    ps -A | grep Steam

This will give you a list of running programs that have the word 'Steam' in them - usually 2 or 3. When I had your error and ran the above command this is what I saw:

    712 ??       700:23.42 /Applications/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/osx32/steam -psn_0_40970
    64849 ttys002    0:00.00 grep Steam

One of the items will be called 'grep Steam' - ignore that one. Each item in the list will have a number - this is the first piece of text on each line. The number we are interested in here is 712.

Run the following command to close the lingering Steam component:

    kill 712

Where you replace 712 with whatever number you found. If there was more than 1 number, run kill again with the other numbers too.

You should now be able to close the terminal, and run Steam just like normal. :-)

I discovered Steam's "Repair tool" in the installer. I'm not sure if it matters, but during my earlier troubleshooting, I deleted everything in my Steam folder except for steamapps, userdata, and "Steam".

The Repair tool ran for quite a while (it seemed to be stuck at the end) and then when it was finished, the update went off without a hitch. It took a few minutes to remember that I'd already downloaded most of my games, but it seems to be in its original working order!

I'm not sure why they don't mention this at all in their troubleshooting article...