Half life 2 help please

well i got the coupon with my 9600XT when i built my pc, and today i downloaded the game from steam and registered my key and got it installed but when i boot it up it sits at the loading screen and freezes.....any fixes?

AMD Athlon XP 2500+ 1.83 GHZ
ATI Radeon X800 Pro 256MB
1 gig of ram
that should be what u need to help lol if more is needed and i forgot just lemme know ill edit this post =P

The latest Catalyst drivers from ATi are the 4.11 series. You can grab them here they were released just a couple days before HL2's release.
If that doesn't work I need more detail, just 'freezing' doesn't help. Does it crash to desktop? Computer shut off? Black screen with no sound? Error?

*EDIT*
There is a set of 4.12 beta drivers out.

Guru3d.com said:

ATI released a Catalyst 4.12 driver (beta) on the same day they release 4.11 which seems to fix a small bug:

"Random hanging has been observed with certain games on certain systems when using the PunkBuster server. To resolve this issue, please download CATALYST 4.12 Beta Release which resolves the majority of cases of this hang."

In contrast, our forums report that these drivers 'might' have HL2 performance improvements. For now this just seems to be a punkbuster hotfix.

Click to expand...

You can grab them here but try 4.11 first. If going to 4.11 doesn't work, 4.12 most likely won't work either. Those are also beta drivers, so you'd be taking a slight risk by installing 4.12.

i found the problem, it was a few temp files from the first boot of it, for some reason they caused it to just stop at the loading screen, any way i got it in game and everything and its works great....i think i got 4.11 drivers but meh ill update later possiblely

Wich loading screen are you speaking of?
If its the Main menu, Just sit back and wait for it to take its sweet time, The main menu of HL2 is actually a map and it change's depending how far you get in the game..Mine took about 5 or 7 mins the first time I started HL2 up, Under 2 mins afterwords..Sometimes under 1 if I just got off and wanna play more hehe

it was before that screen lol but a few temp files were corrupt so i deleted and let steam re update it and now it works like a charm.....the main menu now only takes like 2-3 mins for me to load