Steam update stokes self-important paranoia

You may remember the thrashing bug from Half-Life 2's launch. It made the load times for the game unbearable. And even when the game was running, it was slow and choppy. Every time an auto-save kicked in, you were toast. Nothing will take you out of a game like a freeze frame. It's like having a farter in the movie theater.

Well, Valve introduced a fix, which partially did the job for me. At least until their next update. Then it was back to square one. I figured the bug was just one of those things that developers run into sometimes, where they want to scream, "Buy more memory!" But, of course, they can't. Really, I shouldn't have to. My 3 Ghz, Radeon 9700 with 512 MB
should do just fine on medium settings, but it didn't.

I upgraded to an x800 (thanks Bernie!) and was able to play the game like it's supposed to be played. But I was sore about my run-in with crappy performance. Pouty, even.

Well, Steam has just updated the Source engine with a suspiciously large number of cache fixes. Call me paranoid, but it looks like they launched with some big holes in the code. GASP!