I was playing hl2 DM fine earlier this morning...then for some reason now i cant connect to any server. as you can tell, the internet connection is fine. In the firewalls of my pc, steam and hl2 dm are on the exceptions list so i dont see why i cannot connect. has anyone had this problem?

"login failed after 4 tries"

i restarted my computer and steam 3 times..it finally worked. but i would like to know what to do instead of restarting my pc like 3 times.

This happened to me a couple of times.  If you reinstalled Steam, one of the games you own or purchased a new one, your firewall would have asked you if you wanted it to allow it.  When it happened to me I guess i didn't allow one of the games access.

When I checked my exceptions list I saw the HL2 exceptions.  What I didn't notice was one of them was for CS:S.  I deleted all of the exceptions.  That forced the firewall to ask me again if I wanted to create exceptions for the games through Steam.  I said yes to all, and it was fine. 

There might be a possibility that it's a PLAB file or something like that.  If the above doesn't work, go to the forums at Steampowered.com and do a search for the words in your error msg.  I don't have the energy to look it up right now, but one of the problems will be solved by deleting one file which holds your account password info so you will be forced to enter your username and password again.

Hope it works for you.

Past thread.