cant stop Steamclientbootsrapper from running and I cant delete steam! Help!
One day, not long ago, my Steam wouldnt start anymore and I thought I just needed to restart my PC. After 5 times of restarting and trying to open Steam, I searched for help. I tried many things, and at the end I tried to delete Steam. I deleted about half of the files, because most of them were running in the background. I didnt know that before just now, so I couldnt delete Steam, open it or anything else. And I cant even find steamclientbootstrapper. I cant find it in the task manager or anywhere. I cant delete Steam since my Steam starts up when my PC does, and then I cant download steam again from Steam setup because Steam is already running in the background. And I cant stop Steam from running...
Best Answer
Start your PC in Safe Mode, then proceed to uninstall Steam from the Control Panel (Add/Remove Program).
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How do I stop Steam from running in the background?
How to Stop Steam From Running in the BackgroundDoes uninstalling Steam delete files?
Important: This process will remove Steam and any installed game content from your machine. If reinstalling Steam and Steam games in the near future, please move the steamapps folder (C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Steam\\steamapps) outside of the Steam directory to prevent your games from being deleted.How do I close a Steam game?
Right-click on the selected process. Select "End Process". If Windows asks you to confirm that you wish to quit this game, click the "End Process" button to confirm.How to Fix - Steam App Already Running Error
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Answer 2
What do you mean by deleted? I hope you mean uninstall and you didn't just try to delete the actual Steam files. Trying to delete the files directly (for any program) will usually not work for a multitude of reasons, one reason being that when you install programs registry entries will be installed as well which also need to be deleted, so unless you go through and delete all these as well you won't have a clean uninstall. Another reason, which is what you're experiencing is that things like Steam have background processes and services running which will prevent deletion as you found out.
If you tried to delete it try to uninstall it from Add/Remove Programs instead. Doing it this way will usually close all the services that are running and would prevent deletion.
Manual Registry Deletion
Note that messing with your registry can cause issues with your computer if you do not know what you are doing and make a mistake. I recommend that you export the entire registry as a backup that you can restore just in case.
Go to Run and type in regedit.
For 32 bit OS go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Valve\. Right-click on Valve and select Delete.
For 64-bit operating systems go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Valve\. Right-click on Valve and select Delete.
Then for both go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Valve\Steam Right-Click on Valve and select Delete.
Note you can stop it from starting up by running msconfig and then try to turn everything Steam related to disabled (in services and startup (moved to task manager on 8) tab). This will allow you to delete the files after restarting as Steam won't be running. But I don't recommend just deleting files, always use the uninstaller provided as deleting files manually won't completely uninstall Steam (the registry entries and files in other locations issue that I mentioned previously).
Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Images: Brett Sayles, Brett Sayles, Brett Sayles, Anna Shvets