You must have missed the part where I said you need more experience in order to learn how to conduct yourself in a respectable manner. Operating under the social structure in which the fact you are behaving as an asshole does not matter, as you currently are, I can see where you might have misunderstood my point as something that changed on the pivotal belief of humility being a virtue.
In reality, and completely ignoring the fact that it is not you who defines the existing parameters of this nonsense, you have no way of being able to know for sure that you actually are above the rest of humanity in philosophical, logical, and analytical debate, and as such are doing yourself a disservice by assuming such. In other words, although you probably don't operate within a social structure that understands the concept of embarrassment, I'd like to offer you some advice.
Quit embarrassing yourself.

Any word from the guys up in Bellevue yet?

Nope. I am glad I can share this with you all. Valve customer service in action.

Just to double check, you did actually submit your question right? Ie, you were emailed a reference number and it appears in your "my questions" area. If you have, and you have a forum account over there, PM Burton (he works in support best I can tell) and ask him if he could speed it up.

Yes got my reference number and I can see it on the Steam support tracker. It's just rather amazing it's still open with no reply.
I would rather not PM anyone I don't actually know, thanks for the offer though. I am now facinated to see how long it takes Valve to respond to a complaint (not even a complaint, a polite question) from a user in Europe who does not harass them. What exactly is the support level the average European Joe can expect from Valve?

Funny how most people having the lower hand in a flamewar on forums are actually Mensa members. [Which the guy didn't expectly said, but tried to convey].

BurtonJ is a Valve employee, PMing him won't do any damage. If you tell him how long you have been waiting and how frustrated you are (politely) it's likely he'll help speed it up.

Someone should create a "steamsucks.com" kind of website which could compile all those horror testimonials, and warn potential customers how they could lose access to their account and games at any time, only to be met with arrogance and having their requests ignored. Lawsuits are pretty much unrealisitic, but creating awareness with a .com would probably be the best thing if you're serious about this.

That would take a huge amount of organising not to mention I don't think it's that big a problem. I am sure 90% of Steam users will go through their usage of the system with no problems at all. These sorts of problems only seem to happen to a minority, the best thing to do is simply get the word of mouth out. If anyone asks me about a download service I will still mention Steam but I will mention the potential problems and my personal experience.
I will give them till tomorrow to reply I cant be any more fair than that as that gives them at least 3 full working days to have acknowledged my query. After that I may go ahead and PM that BurtonJ guy.
Just had a reply from Steam support at long last. Apparently there is a payment dispute with my credit card company over The Secret Of Monkey Island: SE. I find that amazing considering that purchase was made and confirmed by my card company on the 17th of July! Plus I have made many more purchases since that date. Anyway there is nothing I can do until I get a reply from the credit card company now as I cant check that far back online.
Bizarre.

using credit cards internationally can be a pain.
It's all for our own good, and it did save me from some fraudulent attempts in russia one time, but it's also caused me no end of problems when i've been travelling in mexico and suddenly my card wouldn't work, etc...
Be interesting if it was the CC's protection measures rather than valve's that caused the issue.
However, you should definitely politely point out that they should automatically send an email with a notification and reason whenever they disable an account. It'd save a lot of confusion and grief.
PS/ I wonder if that's what the new "verified email" thing is for? But i'm reluctant to mess with it cos steam's working for me at the moment, and getting it to accept payments from a UK credit card when living in Japan was kind of a hassle. (though in that case support were pretty good). But i don't want to have to get it all set up again....

That's actually good news, as you will most certainly get the account back. The bad news is, that this probably happened due to some idiot at the CC company/or Valve hitting the wrong key on a computer somewhere which caused the dispute.
PS/ I wonder if that's what the new "verified email" thing is for?
No, that's just to stop people from changing your account password without you being informed.

I laughed at this and the next five or so... Perfection for this thread.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080822

The fact that it took this long for Valve to realize this credit card "dispute" and the fact it took this long for Delixe to even get a response back astounds me and it demonstrates how slow these morons are.

Well, there's already a Comcastsucks, so why not?
Then again, I use Steam, and I intend to use it more and more in the future as another way to buy games, as well as retail, GOG, and whatnot. It's almost like hypocrisy, but then again, I don't care.

This one too.
http://xkcd.com/386/

I found the best one:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20081226