Is anyone else having lots of trouble starting Steam?

My Steam client won't start right. I've been trying all day long. Was trying all day long yesterday too and only got it to work very, very late in the day.

It doesn't offer an option to start offline mode. It just coughs up an error.

Now Steam is starting, but can't connect to the network properly, so I can't see my friends list or connect to the Steam Cloud.

I seem to have solved the problem.

Apparently, this was due to a traffic-limiting thing I'd done with the program Net Balancer, a week ago. I'd closed the program, and it was not running anymore, but apparently the traffic-limiting setting stayed in place even without the program up.

Everything is fine.

Bring out the cookies!