I have been playing rage all along and as of 2 weeks ago everything was fine. I was even happy the new patch addressed the texture pop-in issue but now I start the game and the screen flickers for a second and then the rage icon goes to the task bar and I hear the sound from start up menu in the background and i am back to desktop. I verfied cache and it said 1 file failed to acquire and will try to get but never does. I even deleted the files and re-installed to no avail ( I think I probaly lost my saves doing this). Nothing has changed in my system. Support tells me to turn off background applications-that solution never works. I just want to play again.

Give this a try: go to Steam launch options then put +set com_safemode 1
launch and run the game once then remove the line above.