Steam emoticon displays as a red error box

Question

For a while now I've noticed that a specific Steam emote (:csgohelmet:) displays as what looks like an "error" image, both in the emote picker and the chat itself. However the higher resolution preview image (when you hover over the emote) displays correctly.

I've had a look around and it appears this is a relatively common problem, however I haven't been able to find a solution anywhere.

The only suggested fix I've found is to restart you PC, however since this has been broken for months and my PC has been restarted countless times, this doesn't appear to be a good fix.

Is there any known way to fix this?

Answer 1

I see you mentioned in the comments that you don't want to re-install Steam, but have you tried deleting everything except for steamapps? This will keep your games intact, and even save you storage in the long run, by deleting some junk cache, if you have any custom Steam skins, be sure to back those up before doing it, and I'm pretty sure it will also reset all your local Steam settings.

You mentioned having a PC, but I'll add the directory for Mac in case someone else happens to come across the same problem, and land on this question.

For Windows:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam

Then find the steamapps folder, copy it to your desktop, and delete everything else, after that you can reinstall Steam with your games safe and stable, just like when you verify a game cache. This should fix your emoticon problem.

For Mac:

/Users/User Name Here/Application Support/Steam

Then find the steamapps folder, copy it to your desktop, and delete everything else, after that you can reinstall Steam with your games safe and stable, just like when you verify a game cache. This should fix your emoticon problem.

Hope this helped!