Steam freezing at startup?

As much as I hate it, I happen to use Steam for America’s Army 3 and Team Fortress 2. And one of the most annoying issues I’ve experienced is those rather frequent start-up freezes. Basically, when this happens, after I enter my password the log-in windows says “connecting” and can stay this way for a few minutes. Well, it turns out that this usually means Steam is silently updating something. If you look at your network traffic (for this I simply use my old firewall, Sygate) you’ll see that Steam downloads something, usually slowly (I still haven’t figured out if this is because I just don’t notice it when it’s faster or because their servers are always slow or because they always release updates during rush hours). This way you’ll know it’s not crashed and you just need to wait. The typical silent update size is around 1 MiB, so even if it’s slow it doesn’t take too long.