no clue what’s acting up for you with your current issue, tried clearing the clients cache? (or opting out of beta?)
other than that:
when you go for a reinstall steam, never, delete, everything
you go to your steam folder and you mark everything EXCEPTsteamapps and userdata folder(and the Steam exe), -and only delete the rest, which is a 30sec re-download/install
I imagine this is just because of the overloading on the servers due to sales. I mean, a small company like Valve doesn’t have the resources available to invest in upgrades to handle sales traffic, I am sure…