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After enabling Offline Mode in Steam (while offline) it restarts and idles at a dialog box "Connecting Steam Account: ..." Relaunching and rebooting the machine does not work. Neither does supplying an internet connection.

I'm unable to

  • Log out / switch user
  • View settings or any other window
  • Take any action except Exit Steam

One solution is to completely redownload and reinstall Steam, but I'm connected using my phone, and I don't want to have to reinstall the client and consume data unnecessarily.

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I solved this by moving some Steam files into temporary directories. I picked a few tiny files and folders based on their size, paths, names and, most importantly, last changed dates, thus confident that they will be recreated when the app launches:

  • Program Files/Steam/...
    • update_hosts_cached.vdf
    • ssfn<digits>
    • GameOverlayUI.exe.log
    • GameOverlayRenderer.log
    • /config/*
    • /appcache
      • /httpcache
      • /stats
      • appinfo.vdf
      • localization.vdf
      • packageinfo.vdf
    • /userdata/*

The next launch allowed me to log in again. It was probably enough to do /userdata/* (why would .log files have any effect on launch) but I'm not about to experiment with it further. Let me know when you try it out.

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