Steam and Windows 7, Can't sign on

It works fine on my Windows 8.1 laptop. Now people are telling me to use "a direct connection to the internet".

Well How do you expect me to believe that garbage, when this thing tells me that a third of their servers here in the US is offline? And I shouldn't have to disrupt my home network with a wireless printer and all because then that has to be reset.

Tried port-forwarding, it didn't work. It usually takes 5 seconds for the client to login to the network, silently.
Tried resetting Windows Firewall settings, that didn't work.
Ran Malwarebytes and avast, those didn't find anything having to do with malware or viruses

I even went as far as to cleaning out the entire folder, except for my games, and the Steam.exe file and letting that redownload, that didn't help at all.

Now, I tried to repair-install the Steam Client using the MSI package and that didn't work.

This time, I really went as far as reinstalling the thing because it's going to be a nagging pain in the neck each time I want to play any of my games.

It still didn't work, and neither did directly connecting through my fiber-optic line!

HoneycombAG said:

It works fine on my Windows 8.1 laptop. Now people are telling me to use "a direct connection to the internet".

Well How do you expect me to believe that garbage, when this thing tells me that a third of their servers here in the US is offline? And I shouldn't have to disrupt my home network with a wireless printer and all because then that has to be reset.

Tried port-forwarding, it didn't work. It usually takes 5 seconds for the client to login to the network, silently.
Tried resetting Windows Firewall settings, that didn't work.
Ran Malwarebytes and avast, those didn't find anything having to do with malware or viruses

I even went as far as to cleaning out the entire folder, except for my games, and the Steam.exe file and letting that redownload, that didn't help at all.

Now, I tried to repair-install the Steam Client using the MSI package and that didn't work.

This time, I really went as far as reinstalling the thing because it's going to be a nagging pain in the neck each time I want to play any of my games.

It still didn't work, and neither did directly connecting through my fiber-optic line!

You could try one thing, might only affect downloads though but worth a try, start in offline mode (when login fails, hit offline) once loaded, go to steam > settings > downloads and choose a different server, then restart in online mode, if it works then great, if not then you'll just have to wait until steam fix the server outages.

That's just the thing, too, because picking which ones work and which ones don't is a guessing game. The nearest server closest to me is: US - St. Louis, Missouri

Code:

Problem: Cannot connect to the login server
Root cause: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond

do you have access to a different pc that you can test if the laptop maybe the problem? the only reason I ask is that the issue in the code box above is saying that the target machine actively refused the connection, if it is the laptop at fault then a restore may fix the issue.

I've tried to do System Restore but it's been giving me its own share of errors. This week alone I had to do a Macrium image restore to fix a minor Themes problem. Took me a whole day and a half to put all of my files back in place.

There's more. The Steam client actually keeps track of what's happening when you log-on the service.

Code:

[2015-01-15 14:34:35] Log session started

[2015-01-15 14:34:35] [0,0] SetSteamID( [U:1:0] )
[2015-01-15 14:34:35] [0,0] LogOff()
[2015-01-15 14:34:43] [0,0] SetSteamID( [REDACTED] )
[2015-01-15 14:34:43] [0,0] SetSteamID( [REDACTED] )
[2015-01-15 14:34:43] [1,1] Connect() starting connection (eNetQOSLevelLow, 208.78.164.12:27019, TCP)

[2015-01-15 14:35:04] [1,0] ConnectFailed('Connection Failed':5) (208.78.164.12:27019, TCP)
[2015-01-15 14:35:04] [0,0] StartAutoReconnect() will start in 21 seconds
[2015-01-15 14:35:12] [0,0] LogOff()
[2015-01-15 14:35:13] [0,0] SetSteamID( [REDACTED] )
[2015-01-15 14:35:13] [0,0] SetSteamID( [REDACTED] )
[2015-01-15 14:35:13] [1,3] Connect() starting connection (eNetQOSLevelLow, 208.78.164.14:27019, TCP)

[2015-01-15 14:35:34] [1,0] ConnectFailed('Connection Failed':5) (208.78.164.14:27019, TCP)
[2015-01-15 14:35:34] [0,0] StartAutoReconnect() will start in 18 seconds
[2015-01-15 14:35:36] [0,0] LogOff()
[2015-01-15 14:35:37] [0,0] SetSteamID( [REDACTED] )
[2015-01-15 14:35:37] [0,0] SetSteamID( [REDACTED] )
[2015-01-15 14:35:37] [1,6] Connect() starting connection (eNetQOSLevelLow, 208.78.164.13:27017, UDP)

[2015-01-15 14:35:38] [1,6] ConnectionCompleted() (208.64.200.204:27019, UDP)
[2015-01-15 14:35:38] [1,6] RecvMsgClientLogOnResponse() : [REDACTED] 'OK'

As you can tell, it took multiple retries to log into Steam.

Hmmm. After restarting Steam it reconnected itself without giving me an error, for some unknown reason?

might be because only 3 of the 62 servers in north america are offline according to this

Could be steam is going off old hardware settings