About 2 months ago I started having issues opening my steam client after a regular windows 10 update. Ever since then the following happens when I try to open steam.

When I click the icon to open steam the little "loading user data" box appears and disappears like usual. Only after that, nothing happens. Steam refuses to open.

I opened task manager and I can see clear as day that the steam process is running and is even actively updating games in my library. However it will only open in the background and nothing I do will make it open normally.

I tried clicking on the little icon in the tray of my taskbar to see if I could possibly open it that way by right clicking on it, however when I did that it would give me the following message.

"steamwebhelper, a critical Steam component, is not responding. The Steam UI will not be usable. Click here for more information." It was then followed by some restart options. I tried them all and none worked.

In addition the "click here" link in that message would not work or take me to any page for more info.

After this I opened my steam install folder and deleted out everything except for the steam.exe and the steamapps folder in order to force a reinstall of basically everything. Did this, and still the exact same thing as before happened. Only this time after signing in, the Friends list of all things would open up? I don't get it. It seems like every other component of steam other than the main client was functional?

So I start thinking maybe driver updates would help? Did it, and still did the same thing would happen.

I even freshly installed steam on a completely different drive of my computer and it still would not open.

So at this point I just decided screw it and updated my computer to windows 11 to see if ANYTHING would happen. Did so and it still won't launch outside of just the friend list.

Also if it helps. I run windowblinds 11, retro bar, and Openshell to reskin certain elements of the windows ui, however I have never once ran into any issues with these programs interfering with steam in any way in the past. Even when these programs are fully disabled it seems to make no difference as well.

Did a little more trial and error and found that Big Picture Mode would work fine when forcing steam to launch into it by default. Since then I've been accessing my games this way.

I decided to try making a new steam account just because I was curious to see what would happen. And you know what? It worked? Meaning there is something to do with my original steam account that is preventing it from launching the regular client. My conclusion is that this could possibly be something account related as to this day the alternate account launches into the client fine, and my main account still can't.

For the sake of further testing I also tried signing into my main account's steam client on my steam deck and it worked completely fine in desktop mode.

Can anyone please tell me what the hell is going on? I'm on the verge of factory resetting my pc at this point because I do not understand why this is happening. I really want to get this figured out. Thanks.