I have a boxed copy of the game and am attempting to install it from the disc. The install was going very slowly (estimated at nearly 1.5 hours for completion), so I decided to close it down and reboot my machine. Now that I'm back in Windows (32-bit XP) it doesn't want to let me install the game from the disc, and automatically tries to download from Steam. The problem is that I'm lucky to get ~150k/sec on this connection, and it'll take forever to download.

Is there some way I can force it to install from the disc? Double clicking the DVD drive in My Computer brings up the Reinstall/Uninstall menu, but choosing Reinstall just tries to download everything from Steam. I'm hesitant to try Uninstall, since that may just leave me in the same spot, but without the files that have already been installed, thus taking even longer.

Read this thread, you're not the only one having this problem. I don't intend on being one of them since there's no way I'm going to buy a hard copy game that has an install issue like this. If buy a disc, it will install from the disc. Period.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1122609-have-cd-steam-downloads-anyways/

Actually, I was one of those people. I have now completed 10 plus installs. I have a ghost image I keep restoring of a fresh Windows XP SP3 install with nothing but drivers and Direct X 9 installed.

At this point, I believe that the game always does install from the CD, but there is a strange bug in the installer that makes it crawl like the CD is running at 1x speed. To prove to yourself that it is actually installing from the CD, disable your NIC during the install process. You'll see that the numbers continue to climb.

On my original install, I would have sworn it was installing from Steam because of how slow it went and I couldn't hear my CD drive spinning or lights flashing. On one subsequent install since, it did the same thing, but I disabled my NIC and it continued. When I opened the CD drive, the install stopped until I closed it again.

On all of my other installs, I can hear the CD drive working and it is installing from the CD. I'm am following the same procedure every time. There just appears to be some kind of occasional bug in the installer that sometimes makes the install crawl when installing from the CD.

I saw that other thread after I posted this one, and tried one of the things suggested there (delete the local content, exit Steam, and run a specific install command) and it worked to get me installing from disc again. It still ended up taking about an hour to fully install, so Silverglade's idea of a bugged installer may very well be correct. Either that or I have a problem with my DVD Drive.