Steam: Silly

Steam doesn't work for me anymore. Whenever I try to open it, it's stops responding on the "Connecting Steam account" window, and does nothing no matter how long I leave it for.
Is anyone else experiencing this problem, or has a solution?

Also, in my opinion, I think it would be fantastic if Steam was NOT required to play games, but it was still required to buy/update them, get achievements, talk to friends, use the Cloud, play online etc. It's pretty much Steam's downfall.

I never had that problem but I am having problems connecting to In-game servers, wen ever I try connecting to a TF2 server it's says that the server is not responding so I have to restart TF2 and see if it works.

Steam is just overall weird. I've never had that, but I just wish their download times weren't such crap..