Thanks for all these ideas, Silent Sniper; I really appreciate it. However, none of them have worked for me. i think I'll just stick to BF 1942 for now

I have made sure DirectX and Windows have been as up to date as possible. I still cannot get it to work, however.

Thanks for the advice Silent Sniper, but it didn't work :/

I can't seem to get the revLoader.exe application to run after the v8 patch. I can see the process in Task Manager for a few seconds, but after that, it silently closes. In response to that, I copied my gameinfo.txt file tot he hl2 folder in order to run the game from the hl2.exe directly. The game opens, but tells me that I need to be running Steam Beta in order to connect to servers. When i try to connect to Setti's servers, it declares that I am "in insecure mode." I really wanna play this game, so please help....

I have a problem. Before I applied the v8 patch, CSS actually ran and I could see the available servers (it kept saying I needed to run Steam though). After the path, however, it's not running at all. I check the application in Task Manager; it appears, then crashes without an error. Is there any fix? I'm running on a Windows 8.1 computer.