How can I remove older items from the downloads page, and display newer ones?

The downloads section of Steam's has been frustrating me. It's clogged up by some items I haven't been touching in months, whereas fresh downloads don't show up in the list. To add to the frustration, the status bar only shows the progress of the fresh downloads, ignoring the staler ones.

Removing local content of games in the downloads page does not remove them from my downloads page for some reason.

How can I make the downloads page stop showing these few old downloads, and show newer ones instead?

Solution 1:

Unfortunately, I can't help you with how to fix the problem, but...

(Q4) Yes, yours seems to be broken. The downloads page should display the items which

• are currently being downloaded,
• would be being downloaded, but are paused (either by your action or because you're playing a game), or
• have completed downloading (these have a button to dismiss them, and also go away when you restart Steam).

(Q1) In all cases the status display at the bottom should display counts of the above 3 types of items, and a progress bar for downloads in progress. If you have a game that needs an update, then when you launch Steam it should start updating and appear in the Downloads list and summary.

(Q3) You can't cancel updates to installed games. If things are working right, you have the choice between letting the download/update finish, or doing a “Delete Local Content” (i.e. uninstall), which should cancel the download as well as deleting files. That this didn't work for you is another symptom of the problem.

(Q2) This is not normal behavior. No game should behave like this. Most likely you have some corruption in your Steam configuration which is specific to those games. For what it's worth, the usual general troubleshooting advice I've heard is “delete ClientRegistry.blob”. I get the impression this will not delete any of your settings, but I don't actually know and haven't ever done it myself.

Solution 2:

The particular thing which seems to be your problem (aside from the disappearing game), is that recently, Steam changed the format of their delivered content. As such, games which have an update need to be "converted", prior to actually launch the update.

This causes the "download paused" in the game list, while they don't show up in the download view. To get rid of it, you have to actually launch the game. Steam will propose to convert the game, and it should appear in the download view afterwards.