That worked, thanks dreadylein. Exact procedure to get it right is from page 8 of this thread, if that helps someone else: This didn't work at first, but adding one extra step solved it for me: 1. I deleted both the patched and the original backup .exe file 2. had steam 'verify game cache' to re-download the original .exe 3. ran the game once first! this brought up the 'completing installation' window and modified the .exe that was just downloaded 4. exited the game and patched and now it seems to work. So it looks like maybe people who were re-validating to get a fresh .exe and then immediately patching it had this problem, you have to let Steam launch the game and finalize it first, then patch.