Recently, this past week the official servers for Left 4 Dead 2 servers have been down. Valve officially fixed it with a patch a few days ago; however, there are still a handful of people (including me duh) that can't connect to any online server. We will always get client timed out error message and can only play campaigns offline. Why I'm posting this here instead of the l4d2 forums is because of the specific issue I'm facing.

You see, I noticed in the developer console that "VAC secure mode is disabled" message appeared whenever I loaded a campign or tried connecting online. This has started and stayed in the developer console when I trigger those two conditions ever since the official servers have been messed up. Several of my friends speculated that I am unable to connect online because it keeps getting disabled when its not supposed to.

I have tried disabling and deleting all my mods and then loading campaigns both offline and online with no success. I have contacted Steam Support but they have not offered any solutions to me besides one that failed miserably (reinstalling game and renaming folders). Since this board is specifically catered to VAC discussions, does anybody know how I can reactivate VAC secure mode again but permanently this time?