Steam can't poke through firewall

[Tunnelcat]

Is anyone using Steam getting this message in their event log, "Steam failed to poke open firewall"? This one started showing up since their last Steam update, or perhaps even the most recent Windows Update, and I've never seen that particular error occur before. It usually causes me to have to restart Steam to get it to connect. Doesn't happen again on subsequent launching of Steam until a reboot, then it shows up again.

[Top Gun]

Haven't seen it yet myself, but if it just started happening after their last update, something might have been borked. Could be a fix forthcoming.

[Krom]

Probably valve just goofed up something related to the windows firewall API.

[Duper]

...."poke open".....??


kayyy,,,,,

[Tunnelcat]

...."poke open".....??


kayyy,,,,,

Don't believe me heh?

[Tunnelcat]

Oh this is fascinating. Someone on another forum said that if one used "run as administrator" to launch Steam, the error doesn't occur. Sure enough, that's seems to be the case. Launch it normally, it throws the error every time, even though Steam seems to connect. Now my question is, is that OK to use that option every time I launch Steam? Is there a security issue?

[Krom]

Appears to be an issue with one of the recent steam updates, it shouldn't cause any immediate problems other than being unable to join/host some steamworks multiplayer games. They will probably fix it in an update sooner or later. Probably something silly like they accidentally have steam using the steam.exe credentials (user level) to try to open the firewall instead of the actual steam service credentials (local system account). I see the same error on my system, only a couple times since I usually just leave steam running and it only throws that error when it first loads.

Running steam as an administrator should be harmless, but I'd just wait it out and see if they fix it at some point.

[Tunnelcat]

Well, it didn't get addressed in yesterday's update. Plus, I found a game that I'd been playing a while ago suddenly wouldn't launch. It would drop out right back into the Steam overlay after hitting "play". Had to verify the integrity of the game files to fix a missing 13.8 mg file that went missing for some reason.