...where control is taken away from you for about five to ten minutes as your hard drive grinds constant circles?

Depending on what you're running, the session will eventually end or, if your resources are bled dry by the session, your PC will force reboot itself.

I kinda suspect Steam but since the NSA no longer has to hide it may be them as well.

..then it again it could be a very piss poor programming job on Win 8 and we're now heading into The Linux Era.

Apologies if my memory fails me, but weren't you using a really old disk with your computer? Or have I mixed you up with another user?

I've had Win8 for months now and this hasn't happened to me yet. (and Steam's installed and always running)

That too, but even so, there's a catalyst tripping it up - a process that I didn't execute myself. It has to be a pretty large process as well because I'm running games like DMC on it with no problems what so ever.


Also, a couple days now I have left Steam in offline mode and didn't experience the situation. This mornings bout crashed Steam.

I'm not using Win 8 but that does sound like a hard drive issue.

You may want to do a diagnostic test on your HDD using free tools from Seagate or Western Digital.

In online mode? Hmm...forgot about Seagates free hard drive diagnostic software. I'll give that a go.

However it's still feels suspiciously as if my control is being temporarily taken away while the hard drive is accessed faster than usual.

No, I've never experienced anything like that, and I'm always connected to Steam.

And linux era, suuure. Haha.

Yes

Then it may be result of some hidden trojans or something so magnificent about myself that I'm being singled out and targeted. ...Wait a second, are you also opting for Steam Client Beta Participation?

Yes

It's been demonstrated by Valve that they perform legitimate ownership checks.
Suspect games are often times pulled from user's libraries.

Perhaps I'm on their 'Check more carefully' list.

I could be wrong, it could be my drive I would just think that if were the drive the crash would happen a lot faster and it would happen every time I ran a resource heavy game.

It has? I'm not aware of any checks like that. Do games get pulled from libraries? Sure. Most of the time as a result of whoever bought the game having pulled a chargeback on their payment. Either that or a publisher telling them to pull a batch of keys because they weren't legitimate.

The concept was passed onto me word of mouth by a few people claiming that the titles were added to the defendant's library by illegitimate means after Steam corrected the 'Key-Sharing Exploit" or legitimately purchased titles were tampered with to grant, otherwise purchased, extra content.

More or less I was warned not to use cracks, hacks or edits with my Steam purchased titles as they could be uncovered via routine checks. I can see how Valve could detect a frequently shared key on their end but don't understand exactly how they would be able to uncover a dummy executable or attempts to tamper with game files without having some way of viewing a user's hard drive if given warrant.

This sounds like something that would be checked on startup of the game, not something that happens intermittently. Losing an exploited game makes sense to me. "Tampered to grant otherwise purchased extra content" sounds like a suspicious statement at best. If it's legitimate content it should simply work with the game and be fine, unless perhaps not compatible with the Steam version in some way. Either way it seems unlikely the game would be pulled for that. Sounds more like unlocking DLC that isn't owned legitimately.

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So what you're explaining is that any piracy concerns that Valve would have can easily be uncovered by comparing the users' account purchases to games and DLCs in that user's library therefor actually force-scanning someone's hard drive would not be necessary.

So taking Valve out of the equation -
Leaves us with "The All-Seeing .net Eye" or some hack who has a creepy (and perhaps sexual) interest that prevents them from any activities aside from getting a closer sniff of my rectum.

And, once again - it may just be the drive OR it could be some form of snittery that most don't normally notice taking place in the background because their SATAs compensate for the slow down.