Half-life 2 problems

Installed my brand-new HL2 that my GF (no - not GeForce...) gave me for Christmas. The installation itself went fine, but starting the game just started the Steam updater - which failed...

After a bit of tweaking of my firewalls (XP2 and NetGear), I had to resort to visiting the Steam site for support (quite demeaning for a computer litterate). Nothing their to help, but I happened to see something about registering an account and entering the CD-key during the installation. I saw nothing of that, so finally it dawned on me I already had Steam installed from playing Counter-Strike. Much to my surprise I had to uninstall the old Steam installation and start over.

OK, I could probably have got it working if I'd played around a bit with Steam, and/or the registry and/or my previous Steam account, but this is just a bad user experience. Shape up Valve!
---------------------------------------------------------------
#wapmarks - WAP links and personal phone startpage