Vista - ERROR: hl2.exe has stopped working

I just got a new computer with vista home premium on it. I installed steam,
updated my graphics card drivers, and installed cs:s and it worked great for
a few days. But now, whenever I try to launch cs:s, it just takes me to the
menu screen and then crashes, and I get a message that says "hl2.exe has
stopped working". I reinstalled steam and cs a few times. Then I heard this
was an issue with dep, and I was told that I needed to go to the command
prompt, run as administrator, and type in a command that disabled dep, but
I'm still getting the problem. I seriously don't know what to do. Can anyone
help?

Steam and HL2 is are Vista compliant or at least Steam supports vista. I'm
not sure where the DEP issue comes in. I didn't have to do anything with DEP
to get Steam installed and HL2 (and the add-ons) to work.

I'd be more out to look at any other updates or software add that's you've
done to the system. Any tweaks to the firewall, Maybe Windows Defender. Any
anti-Virus software. I'm guessing something else changed.

One thing you could try, is to create another user account, log-in and try
to play with that account. Over in the FEAR forums there was a guy who could
patch the game and when he tried that it worked. If it doesn't work, then
you might have a registry corruption issues or something else going on in
your profile that hindering HL2

i dont have a answer to that but the same happened to me its because of AIM it has a virus. there is a file i cant find but if i do ill post it

I'm having the same problem, I have vista ultimate 32bit, and i get the same exact message. I'm trying to uninstall my sisters stupid aim6 to see if this works....

Are you overclocking? i had the same message for a while. i have vista
ultimate 32. When i raised my vcore or lowered my clock speed to a more
stable level, it worked.

I've never overclocked this :/ it does this for HL2, CS:S, and all of the rest of my steam games.... this also happens to A LOT of games with any form of a physics engine, if it has anything with physics, (besides ragdolls) it says "blah blah blah.exe has stopped working" usually hl2.exe.

I think it has to do with AIM 6's security update. I hadn't gotten on AIM in a very long time and today i got on and installed the update and now i get the HL2 error on all my games. Has anyone figured out how to fix this? My virus scanner doesn't detect any coded viruses inthe files, so what else could it be? HELP!

I don't have AIM, but i have the same problem.

Has nothing to do with AIM. I had the same problem and have never had
AIM installed on my system. Something to do with STEAM. had to
reinstall steam to get everything working good.

I had the same problem when I got a new computer with Vista Businiss x64 opening Portal or TF:2 after a few seconds it would either just close or crash.

It did not start like that though for about 2 days it worked fine, then it would sometimes crash after playing for a few minutes now it crashes before it opens.

I actually just set it as an exception in the DEP for steam which might have helped, still need to test it though.

But here is how you can try the same.

Control Panel > System And Maintenance > System > Advanced System Settings > On the Advanced tab go to setting under Performance then Data Execution Prevention.

You can either try setting it to "Turn on DEP for essential windows programs and services only"

Or try turning DEP on for all programs and add Steam as an exception.

I haven't tested if it's fully worked yet, but Portal does open now.