Checking things off...or not

I finished the sticker and poster a couple days ago.

My Portal 2 map and Backstock work haven't had any progress lately. My desktop has failed to go to hybrid sleep twice (fade to black followed by a hang) and both times Steam has decided it needs to "update" Portal 2. "Update" meaning download all 6.6GB of content and completely replace all files.

I've tried moving all existing Portal 2 content to the download directory, but I didn't change the timestamps and a casual glance did not reveal a progress log. So, Steam proceeded to redownload everything.

Checking game cache integrity doesn't help either. It just says "1 file failed to validate" and continues downloading everything. Subsequent checks freeze and make Steam unusable ("Hey, Hey wait. Validation window is active, can't let you do that, Dave."), while it continues to download everything. I haven't checked after it finishes downloading. Mainly because I'm afraid it'll start downloading everything again.

Setting "Do not automatically update this game" once the download starts doesn't do anything (makes sense, but only if files are overwritten; they aren't until everything is downloaded). I've set it again and disabled cloud support to see if this download frenzy starts again.

I can start the Authoring Tools while the download is going, but once the download stops and file moving begins, things will get hairy (locked resources). It doesn't matter anyways because the game won't start. Well, it will in that it loads the intro video (completely ignoring the global -novid parameter set in Steam) and then crashes because it can't find the background image (materials/console/portal2_product2_widescreen.vtf). This crash isn't new as the Source Filmmaker couldn't handle this error when it came out, either (I haven't started it since).

You'd think Valve could, I don't know, have a default color to display should the background not exist. Maybe the error I see is the start and the game simply goes into catastrophic failure so fast, it can't show all the other errors (given the error box spam I've seen since Windows 98 SE, I doubt this is the case), but that doesn't explain why the game doesn't die until I acknowledge the missing background (suggesting there are no other errors to show).

Also, Steam is ignoring game activity. It used to stop downloading if I so much as started the Portal 2 Authoring tools. Now, it keeps downloading regardless of what I start (also confirmed with a friend's machine). Steam just sucks up all available bandwidth until it is sated.

Steam is still intermittently starting games other than what I double-clicked on. "Double click on Borderlands 2? Well, I'd better start Blade Symphony." I use the alphabetical list and don't recall it choosing a game after my choice alphabetically, just before.