Steam – How to add a command line argument to a steam game

From your Steam library, right click on a game and select "Create Desktop Shortcut."

You can then drag the shortcut onto your Start Menu. If you just drop it here, it will become "pinned" to the Start Menu, and you can access it quickly.

If you hold your cursor over "All Programs" for a couple of seconds, the menu will expand. You can then drop it into any of the folders, or leave it in the root of the "All Programs" listing.

If you want, you can also open the Start Menu's folder, and organize it with Windows Explorer. Where you'd normally type to search, type %APPDATA% and hit Enter. This will take you to the following directory:

C:\Users\(Your Username)\AppData\Roaming\

Then navigate to:

Microsoft -> Windows -> Start Menu -> Programs

Any shortcuts you drop into this folder will show up on your Start Menu, and any folders you create here will be created on your Start Menu as well.

Note that Steam shortcuts are protocol shortcuts - like links to URLs, and not program shortcuts - like links to an application. If you move your Steam installation, they won't need to be updated. However, if you uninstall Steam, shortcuts to your non-Steam games that were created through Steam will probably cease to function.

Well.. it turns out that somehow there was an issue downloading the patches -- both the 8.1 and 7.9 -- in the first place. They were each 41k in size. On a whim, I tried re-downloading, and the 8.1 patch was over 200MB this time (!).

After re-downloading and getting the 200MB version, the patch installer started up fine.

Really not sure what happened here. But I'm all set now.