Well i just installed BF2 from a CD and it took me a couple days to get the game and it's expansions working. I installed it and reinstalled it to get it to work and went to regedit to delete somethings while I was following someone's guide. Perhaps in the process i changed a setting i'm not aware about. Then I tried to open steam, which i've had installed before i put BF2 on my laptop. It would say it's not recommended to run in compatibility mode and to turn it off. I've tried the original poster's guide, yet i couldn't find steam.exe, perhaps i could've missed it. I then uninstalled it, then reinstalled it, and once again it gave me the compatibility issue message. I currently have Steam uninstalled.