Missing registry file
Don't redownload it through Steam. That is apparently the source of your problems. Others have reported problems with the Steam installation of the game.
Download it from the PlayNC site on the Account page.
Or I'll do the heavy lifting and give you the direct links.
PC Client download
If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.
Black Pebble is my new hero.
I replied in your other thread in player questions, short version of something to try;
copy cohupdater.exe to dektop. running that, it should fail to detect city of heroes, and ask where you wish to install it. Point it to the parent directory of your current CoH folder (pointing the coh folder will result in it re-downloading a copy to D:\[...]\City of Heroes\City of Heroes\). It should then install the missing registry files, and then verify the existing files in the folder (and download any missing/out-of-date files as necessary.
Steam seams to be able to self-fix any missing/incorrect registry values when executing the files. So after your OS install, running steam added the relevant registry files as they relate to steam.
CoH on the other hand - well, our updater seems to primarily check if the folder it's in contains the relevant files, if not, run installation code. So it doesn't self-correct the registry as efficiently.
"My inner mind has become a reality-cracking overgod. He torments me! Help!"
Alright, I installed this game via Steam on a Vista 64-bit system. Had recently had problems and upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit, by wiping my primary partition, completely separate from my games partition.
Now - I try to run the game via Steam, everything works great, until I'm in the game.
I get the server list, but instead of displaying each server name, I get a list of servers with the name of the path to my Steam directory, instead of the names of each server. Upon clicking one of these, it tells me that my game is out of date and that I'm missing a registry file.
I've been told that Steam is the problem and that I shouldn't update the game with Steam, so I didn't. I ran the CoH updater and got everything up-to-date, verified all files with the CoH Updater. Even redownloaded the game and repeated this process (redownloaded through Steam) and here I am, with the same friggin' problem.
It appears that I am simply missing registry files and I assume this means I'd have to download the client elsewhere, but I seriously do not want to do that again, since I've wasted so much time downloading crap already.
Is there some way that someone could just hand me their registry files and show me where to edit them to match the paths and what-not that I need to make this thing work?
Oy.