Well, since my name is mentioned I just have to jump in.

My PCs over the years have been rock solid. When they crash or lock up it is a case of wow - stands back in amaziement. Problems once every few months - say half a dozen times per year.

EXCEPT

Whenever I have to use a game nvolving STEAM. Constant crashes, instability and grief. Half a dozen times per day is not unusual. Now, I'm not a brainless, bigot and I know that in this particular case LH is in beta and is blessed by appalling memory leaks over time so perhaps Steam is not quite  so bad. But LH is not the only game I have attempted to play with steam and have trouble with. Steam has always given me grief. I am insulted at the childish pointless moronic "features" it offers and have no interest in them.  The benefits are to the game developers.

I like LH and want to play it more. Even though I have a free licence for LH I am quite prepared to pay full price on the game for a full steam-free licence. I expect I will even experiment a little more disabling everything in Steam I possibly can and playing offline. I might even create a STEAM/LH/NO Antivirus/No firewall bootable partition on my PC with with practically nothing in it except the OS Win7 probably, just to see if I can get a 100% stable environment. I shouldn't have to do this though just to play a good game.

My gut feeling is that Steam causes more instability at times of peak usage so perhaps the issues are steam server response times, timeouts, retrys, underlying steam networky issues. I can quite see how the top level application relying on Steam might lock up and freeze if Steam was having network connectivity issues.

PS Don't know if people reading this have picked up o it - but I loathe and detest Steam. Not just for the technical issues but for the concept of all that power and influence affecting the PC games market concentrated in just one place in the hands of ajust a few individuals. But that should be the issue in another discussion thread one day perhaps.

The best thing about computers - the fact that no two are exactly the same - is also the biggest problem. Software is designed around a stable working environment, and the slightest little thing can break that stability and scatter it across the proverbial floor.

Take W40K:DoW, for example. Used to run perfectly fine, then I reinstalled my OS and it stopped working right. Crashed on load every time. After a few emails back and forth with THQ support, I found out the problem: one of Spybot SD's 64-bit utility applications. The kind of thing that's never present in a developer environment, and thus may do things at the point of execution that were never anticipated in house. Disabling the offending third party app fixed the crash instantly.

EVE Online, which I play, had a long-standing problem with the Creative Soundblaster Media Center application. The two absolutely would not get along. It became enough of an issue that I spent ~$300 to build a low-end gaming rig purely for EVE Online. Didn't even install audio drivers. Ran *flawlessly*.

I run a rather minimalist setup. I don't know enough about Win7 to be able to trim all the fat from the components/services list, but I know enough. I've got almost everything disabled that isn't essential to a stable operating environment. I'm extremely careful with my web browsing, everything has to ask me for cookie permissions, I don't run third-party communications software on this rig at all (ie AIM, YIM, Skype, etc.). Steam has never given me the slightest issue. I was one of those people merrily playing Skryim in 5-hour+ stretches while reading all the forum posts of people with serious problems and wondering what they had installed to make their builds, many similar to mine, inherently unstable. Never found out, of course = P

Anyhow, the point to this little rant is that everything matters, every last factor of your hardware and software loadout changes your operating environment, and not always for the better. If you want to do a stability impairment test, disable every background app either through component services or msconfig, then slowly turn things back on and see if/when stuff breaks.