Steam – How to remove a screenshot from the background rotation

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. :-)

Unfortunately, I can't help you with how to fix the problem, but...

(Q4) Yes, yours seems to be broken. The downloads page should display the items which

• are currently being downloaded,
• would be being downloaded, but are paused (either by your action or because you're playing a game), or
• have completed downloading (these have a button to dismiss them, and also go away when you restart Steam).

(Q1) In all cases the status display at the bottom should display counts of the above 3 types of items, and a progress bar for downloads in progress. If you have a game that needs an update, then when you launch Steam it should start updating and appear in the Downloads list and summary.

(Q3) You can't cancel updates to installed games. If things are working right, you have the choice between letting the download/update finish, or doing a “Delete Local Content” (i.e. uninstall), which should cancel the download as well as deleting files. That this didn't work for you is another symptom of the problem.

(Q2) This is not normal behavior. No game should behave like this. Most likely you have some corruption in your Steam configuration which is specific to those games. For what it's worth, the usual general troubleshooting advice I've heard is “delete ClientRegistry.blob”. I get the impression this will not delete any of your settings, but I don't actually know and haven't ever done it myself.