I have owned Half-Life 2 for 9 1/2 months now.

I have never played it.

Yesterday I got a wild hair to try and install it again. I searched through online help, the forums where others bitched about install problems, anything I could find. I made a couple of basic changes and tried again.

1) Same place, disk three, base source shared sounds.gcf - a cache of Half-Life 2 files automatically installed with Steam - is corrupt or somehow inaccessible to the installer. Install failed.

2) No big deal, through Steam you can select 'Download products I already own' by entering the CD-Key. I enter it, and get: "You must have the product installed before you can use this". Can someone please explain to me - because I am obviously a blithering retard - why you would even want to download a product that was already, successfully installed? So I can't download the product through Steam to get it installed because I don't already have it already installed. Dead end.

3) But wait! I read on a forum that if you have the Half-Life 2 demo installed, it will allow you to enter your key and download the product, a sneaky workaround that several had used successfully. So I find and download the HL2 demo. It proceeds to reinstall Steam - even telling me to shut Steam down so it can install it again - and then stops. No demo. 'Browse games' in Steam gives options for purchasing the entire product, but no free demo. Searching the web doesn't turn up anything better, another dead end.

4) Well, during the installation there is an option to register the game. Maybe that will open a door somewhere. Well guess what? You 'register' your ownership of the game with a third party so that you can receive promotional offers. Nothing to do with Valve.

5) Last chance, in attempt #3 I reinstalled Steam, so that .gcf file has been freshly downloaded. Perhaps that cleared the problem up. Tried the installation again, but guess what - Half-Life 2 installation begins with a reinstallation of Steam from the disc. Any chance of fresh files making a difference is flushed away as the corrupt file is automatically put back in place. Because GODDAMN EVERYTHING from Valve begins with a reinstallation of Steam.

6) From the forums I read, this problem is insurmountable if what I tried in attempt #3 didn't work. There are reports of people even trying other people's CDs to install and having it continue to fail. Sometimes using a DIFFERENT CD DRIVE did the trick...but my secondary CD-ROM is not hooked up. And to be brutally honest, I don't have the hardware skills to do it without help.

So very good, Valve. You got what I'm certain was $50 out of Jessie last Christmas, and if I want to play the game, I need to drop another $50 to buy it again. All this because you insist on using the Steam installer, a product that even your fans admit is invasive and pushy.

At least someone gave me my old copy of Half-Life 1. Score is 1-1, myself and Valve are tied.