Had something similar yesterday - while game downloading click play - steam will freeze for a few seconds then display the launch dialog - click cancel and it freezes for about a minute (reproduced 2-3 times last night)
Tried to reproduce just now (on a seperate boot session) and the freeze times are much less (the launch dialog only appears for about 2 seconds as opposed to 30) possibly due to the files being already allocated.
We will have a fix for the cancel not actually cancelling the install in the next client update. There will likely still be some delay between pressing the button and having the cancel occur, but usually that should be a second or less.
@gdrewb-valve: Unfortunately this is still not fixed. Actually the behavior seems to be unchanged. When I clicked Cancel during TF2 pre-install dialog, it caused whole desktop to be frozen for about half a minute (and I am using SSD disk) and then it started downloading the game as if Cancel was never clicked.
Could you reopen this?
Reopening as the fix didn't work.
The fix was only active for newer-approach game layouts. Older game layouts are going to be converted in the upcoming months so the remaining games will start working over time. Unfortunately between now and then this behavior will still occur but we don't have a quicker fix coming.
Nothing extracted yet.
Steam freezes when the game install dialog is cancelled while there's a progress bar for "Creating local game cache files".
How to reproduce:
Steam either freezes (more probably) or continues after a while as if Cancel button was never clicked.
Debian experimental x86_64, Gnome Shell 3.6.