Application running on taskbar, but nothing on screen

[shoenberg3]

Hello,
Whenever I try to start the game Half life 2 or any of its mods, it says "preparing to launch ..." and nothing happens. When I bring up taskmanager, hl2.exe has started, but nothing happens onscreen. Already, I have:

-updated my driver for graphic card and have DX 9.0c
-validated game, cache, defrag
-have the latest steam version

On the other hand, CounterStrike works fine on my machine.

Help?

Thanks

 

[Enjoihcky24/7]

If you have a firewall such as comodo or zone alarm you make have to manually configure it to allow the program to run.