Steam has stopped working on me

recently steam has stopped working on me, it keeps telling me that there is another instance of steam already running. although there is nothing in task manager.

i have tried uninstalling steam and reinstalling it. now it starts to update, gets to 26% then gives me the same message again.

this really sucks as nearly half my pc game collection is on steam.

anyone have any ideas on what to do.

Take off the compatibility mode on the steam.exe file.

i dont have compatibility mode turned on

edit: oh wait i clicked on check compatibility for all users. and it was turned on in there. which is pissing odd because it was fine for my username, which, naturally was the one i was using.

why is nothing ever easy