I just encountered an issue where Steam would not launch. It simply displayed this error:

“The registry is in use by another process, timeout expired”

For anyone else who has this problem, it’s due to background processes interfering with Steam.

There are a fair few pointless processes running when you boot into Windows 7. To fix this (and hopefully resolve the Steam issue), click run msconfig and select the services tab. Check the “Hide all Microsoft Services” button, then hit “Disable All”. This should stop any non-essential services running on startup, and should enable you to run Steam.

For more info, visit the Steam support page!