jimnms wrote on Apr 15, 2012, 16:42:

Creston wrote on Apr 15, 2012, 14:37:
Has anyone else had problems with Offline mode lately? When my internet went down again, I tried putting Steam in offline mode, and the stupid thing said that "This operation cannot be completed in offline mode."

What, you mean turning ON offline mode? WTF?

Looking at Steam's support forum, it seems tons of people have the same issue, and of course Valve has yet to respond to a single one of the threads opened on the topic...

I'm just going to run it offline all the time, I guess. What's the point of offline mode if it doesn't fucking work when you need it??

Creston

I had a problem a while back where Steam wasn't shutting down properly preventing me from going to offline mode. I didn't notice the problem for a while because I usually start Steam when I play a game and leave it running until I shut down for the day. I believe the problem has something to do with the Steam Cloud syncing.

When you close Steam do you get a little box that pops up that says something about finishing sync? It has two buttons, one is grayed out and the other is cancel. It usually only pops up for a split second.

Check with task manager (or better yet Process Explorer) and make sure Steam.exe and SteamService.exe stop when you close Steam. Also watch and make sure a steamerrorreporter.exe does not run when you start and stop Steam. I suggest Process Explorer because I don't think task manager updates fast enough to catch the steamerrorreporter.exe. You can configure Process Explorer to highlight new and closed processes. Set the highlight duration to 3 seconds because it runs and closes in about a second.

When this was happening I couldn't switch it to offline mode, either while it was running or during start up. I also didn't get the little popup window about syncing when I closed it, which is why I think it has something to do with the Steam Cloud sync. I didn't realize this until after I fixed it though.

Try this before fixing it the way I did it. Go in the Steam settings and turn off Steam Cloud. Close Steam and open it a couple of times before turning it on again. If that doesn't work, this is how I fixed it. Rather than close Steam the normal way, I just killed the Steam process using Process Explorer. The next time it ran, the steamerrorreporter.exe didn't run, and Steam has been shuting down properly since.