Fix: Steam thinks it's running in compatibility mode

When I tried to run Steam tonight on my Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit system it said this for the first time: "Running Steam in Windows compatibility mode is not recommended. Please remove any Windows compatibility settings for all users under file properties for Steam.exe and restart Steam. Press 'Cancel' to premanently ignore this warning and continue." I found the fix below posted by ZeroHour on edugeek.net so I decided to put it here for my own convenience.

Follow the link for the original post: Post by ZeroHour

Hi Just thought I would post a solution to a problem I had with Steam on Windows 7 RC x64 (but I believe it can happen in vista as well) Everything was working in steam for weeks until I went to close it down last night, when I exited steam windows poped up with a message stating it was going to apply compatility settings to steam as it detected a problem (no cancel or way to stop it doing this)

When I relaunched steam it poped up with a message telling me: Running Steam in Windows compatibility mode is not recommended. Please remove any Windows compatibility settings for all users under file properties for Steam.exe and restart Steam. Press 'Cancel' to premanently ignore this warning and continue.

Reinstalling steam made no difference as well as trying to set compatibility settings under the shortcut. I eventually had a go of the application compatibility tool microsoft gives out to see that the settings saved on the machines local database and that triggering when I ran steam. I had a hunt through the registry and found the area where the keys are kept and deleted the key and my problems were gone.

To fix the issue:
1.Hit start->run->regedit
2.Go to key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers
3.Look for a entry with your path to steam.exe
4.Delete that entry
5.If you dont find it there try HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers

Hope this helps if you get the issue.

TiVo/network scheduling fail

On Thursday night my TiVo disappointed me. I know it wasn't all TiVo's fault, but I hoped for more than I got. There was a storm, and the storm coverage (mostly) stayed during the commercials where it belongs. My Uninterruptible Power Supplies kept my TV, TiVo, and computer all running. Unfortunately a collision of scheduling quirks kept me from getting the season finale of The Mentalist.

NBC likes to run snippets of their shows at the very end of their timeslots, butting them against the opening of the following show. Unfortunately these snippets frequently go up to a minute past the official scheduled time. I compensate for this by telling TiVo to extend the end time by one minute when recording The Office. This usually works fine. My TiVo records all of The Office, sometimes using its second tuner to tune to the same channel and record Parks and Recreation which may follow it. When another program I watch is on at the same time but a different channel, that program or Parks and Recreation may be clipped by a minute depending on their relative priority in my season pass manager.

This time CBS scheduled the season finale for The Mentalist as a two hour block overlapping the end of The Office and the beginning of Parks and Recreation. Since The Mentalist was a lower priority than either The Office or Parks and Recreation, my TiVo decided to skip recording The Mentalist all together.

Of all the things my TiVo could have done, this is my least favorite. So, what would I have preferred?

1. Seeing that it would miss one minute at the beginning of The Mentalist and one minute in the middle, go ahead and make two recordings of 59 minutes each.
2. Send me a conflict message, telling me that one of my programs would not be recorded so I could fix the conflict manually.
3. If a conflict occurs for a channel that is already being recorded on one tuner, clip the program and let the other tuner be used for a channel that's not being recorded.

TiVo engineers, how soon can you get that fixed for me?