Found this issue trying to get the Half-Life beta working. Running hl_linux, one of the errors is "Could not load hw.so. Please try again at a later time."

However, a quick strace shows that it's not properly searching for hw.so:

open("/lib/i686/.so", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/lib/sse2/.so", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/lib/.so", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/i686/.so", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/sse2/.so", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/.so", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
munmap(0xfffffffff773a000, 147967)      = 0
write(2, "Could not load hw.so.\nPlease try"..., 55Could not load hw.so.