Steam offline question

I've never used Steam much except for a couple of valve games until recently. I bought several games during the big holiday sale and I had a problem trying to play one the other night.

My internet connection went out and I decided to load up Titan Quest. When I tried to start the game I got an unable to connect to steam pop up box and it would kick me back to the desk top.

After a couple of more tries I finally got a box to come up with an option to start steam in offline mode. But when I tried to do that, an error box would pop up saying can't connect to steam blaa... blaa... blaa and it kicked me back to the desk top game over. Rinse, repeat

I never got the game to launch and got the same results trying to launch Torchlight. This left me mumbling about clouds and DRM and hunting up a boxed game to play.

Anyway, I know Steam is designed to let you play offline so my question is...Do I need to keep Steam starting up in offline mode? Or am I just having some kind of Steam/Windows 7 error?

It seems like many people are having problems with starting Steam in offline mode since the latest update to Steam. It is unknown whether this behavior is intentional or not.

For now, the way to launch Steam in Offline Mode is to FIRST launch Steam while online, then go to File --> Go Offline. This will allow your next launch of steam to be offline.

It's annoying, but it's a workaround until we see how this problem gets addressed.

Thanks Kent.

Once I got my connection back I immediately switched it to start in offline mode and I'm going to keep it like that for the time being.