After hours of pulling my hair our from reinstalling flash etc, I realized CCleaner was causing me grief with steam. I have a brand new gaming PC (3 days old) and was trying to figure out for the life of me why Steam looks like this.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5554506/steam.jpg
It then became strange when the images in that scrolling section changed to new ones, and the new images worked flawlessly, but previously broken images remained broken. I then knew it had something to do with a cache and after finding a forum on Steam I narrowed it down to CCleaner. That's what the Steam CCleaner