Are we supposed to be able to copy shortcuts to this folder? On my system it won’t let me for some reason and I can’t get Steam to load on windows boot after a terrible hard crash (thanks Cyberpunk).
There’s probably some sort of dependency/race condition that makes the run key preferable for Steam rather than waiting for the shell to load, which is when stuff in the startup folder would run.
It does sound like something may be corrupt in the Steam client files. I’ve had something similar happen after a Steam update, where Steam would appear to launch the client but then claim to be updating and never actually launch. I had to reinstall the client to get it to work again.
BE AWARE : Uninstalling Steam will remove the game files for all of your installed games.
To avoid having to download/reinstall everything, go to your Steam installation folder and delete everything except steam.exe and the /steamapps/ folder. Then just double-click on Steam.exe and it will download all the other files needed for the steam client. The steamapps folder is where all your games are installed by default (assuming you haven’t already moved the folder to another drive for space considerations), so your game content will remain and all the registry entries for your games will still be there as well since you never technically “uninstalled” Steam, just replaced the support files.