And the Green party thought automobiles were bad for the economy... :D

Your 02c worth is definitely 02c worth... Letting a hacker and poor customer service who don't know a function from a variable keep you from playing some of the best quality games ever is a sad thing to see. There are a ton of companies out there (EA for one), who create games and then forget about them. Or they create patches that don't do anything but solve a few problems but create so much more. I'd highly recommend giving Valve another shot at it. They provide quality updates for their products (TF2 and L4D receive huge in game updates a few times a year). I'd give you my 2 cents worth but I spent it on HL for $1 on steam...

i woke up to this?

I've seen this done on a few other websites as well... wowhead.com (World of Warcraft db) ran a contest where you had to find where 5 different pictures were located on the site. It wasn't the best contest as the name of the file name was the exact same that they used for the caption as the filename for the page. So what people ended up doing was caching the whole site and just doing a quick search for where file name *******.jpg was located at.