steam friend network

i am having trouble with the steam friends network ,i can add friends but when sending an athorisation request nothing happens, i also need to dissable my firewall to find servers even though both steam and hl2 have full acces.
any ideas
(my firewall is mcafee)

 

Thats funny steam seams to overpower my mcafee even with with block all access on steam.
The only thing that will block it for me is windows firewall I have winxp pro service pack 2 with all the updates so if you have windows firewall on try looking there firewalls seem to conflict each other.

 

wow maybe they fixed it.. b/c it has never worked for me.. they have lots of programs.to see where your freinds are.. what game they are playin.. back in the day you click a link and it opens your game and joins the sever for you... a program off the top of my head Xfire.. but i heard from someone it has spyware.. but look it up