[Half-Life Windows] When game closes Steam says I'm still playing

[Cianez]

Every time I start Half-Life (or a Half-Life mod), when I close it Steam detects that the game is still open and that I am playing. However, the game is not open; there is no "hl.exe" or "GameOverlayUI.exe" process in the Task Manager. Restarting Steam (which must be closed due to the message "Waiting for Half-Life to close ...") doesn't solve the problem as the game still seems to be open according to Steam. The only way to fix it is to restart the whole system. This problem doesn't allow me to start the game a second time if it has already been opened earlier during the same session, forcing me to restart the system. According to some sources, it could be the Discord overlay that causes this problem. However, by completely disabling the overlay, the problem doesn't solve. For your information, I'm using the Half-Life beta.

My system:

• Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450
• GeForce GTX 770 DirectCU II 2048MB
• 8GB RAM 1066 MHz

EDIT:

According to a support ticket I sent to Steam a couple days ago:

Recently some server side services provided by Microsoft have been unavailable and have caused features on those versions of Windows related to Games Explorer functionality to fail and hang when launching many games both inside and outside of Steam. We’ve reached out to Microsoft about this problem and hope they will resolve it. A workaround for this is to modify the registry key “Games” under "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\GameUX\ServiceLocation" to an empty string rather than the Microsoft GamesWebService URL. This will disable some related Games Explorer functionality.

It seems to have worked on my end. If someone else is having this problem, please try the fix above and report back in this thread (make a .reg backup of the "ServiceLocation" folder before proceeding to avoid being unable to revert it back to default). However, I've heard people having this issue on Windows 10 and I don't know if the registry paths are the same.

[CS-PRO1]

Yea this exact issue made the game unplayable for me on Win7. That GameUX trick got it to work just fine, and I believe the registry paths for Win10 are relatively the same.

[afwn90cj93201nixr2e1re]

there zombie process, or you just injected something to your game which not unloaded at end, and thats why you can't do what you want.

expected windows behaviour.

[AlyMar1994]

I have this exact same issue, but I've found a (potentially unsafe?) workaround for it.

All you need to do is kill off "rundll32.exe" in Task Manager, and Half-Life will stop hanging and close. I have to do it all the time, and it's begun to happen to more and more games for me; specifically Half-Life 2, Fallout, and other misc. games too.

I'm on Windows 7 Home.

EDIT: Now, mind you, it doesn't always happen. But it's frequent.

[Maxi605]

The solution was found in #2543

I came across this post: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/old_games_not_launching_and_eating_100_of_the_cpu_on_windows_7/post1

This fella did an amazing job at explaining the bug and also providing a very easy solution on how to fix it. I applied the fix to my registry manually and everything is working normally again!

[afwn90cj93201nixr2e1re]

it's not realted to zombie process, u r just confusing ppls.

[afwn90cj93201nixr2e1re]

So, can confirm after steam update:

Seems like hl.exe never unload, only when im closing it manually.

Win 10, x64.