Had the strangest thing happen last night. As I was checking my feeds to see what’s new, I noticed a new ‘mod’ for Half-Life 2 had been uploaded to GameSpot DLX. The mod adds high resolution textures to a handful of the main characters in the game and the result is simply amazing…

I downloaded it right away and fired up Half-Life 2… nothing. Steam signed in, I got the ‘preparing to play Half-Life 2′, then nothing. It just sat there. I checked my running processes and hl2.exe was running at 18 MB but the game never started. After troubleshooting for a couple hours (which included reinstalling Steam and HL2, running a spyware scan and virus scan) I found a post on the Steam message boards where a couple users were complaining about the same issue. It turns out that IconPackager (the application I use to change my icons) is the culprit. I know what you’re thinking – something along the lines of ‘WTF?’ My thoughts exactly. Sure enough, after uninstalling IconPackager, HL2 started right up. Unreal! But this isn’t where the story ends. Over the past couple weeks, every single time I shut down or restart, my soundcard driver crashes and has to be shut down manually. Since removing IconPackager, this problem seems to have disappeared.

So what’s the deal with IconPackager that makes it fuck with your system? It prevents a game from running and crashes a driver. All of this from an app that is only suppose to change my icons. Ok…