I made the file an exception, specifically gave it the "allow" through the firewall and past the virus checker -- no go. Between my last Windows, drive, game and viral updates it doesn't want to play. Even turned off my incoming virus scan to see if that would work. The manual still hangs up.

I'll look into Whitelisting, but that seems to be run through the dev's website and has forms. It may take a few days to clear the time and it won't be an instant fix.

For now I'll just go back to II and wait for IV.

Shame, after a really difficult start up it had become my favorite 4X. Often opened it just to play with the ship designer.

Thanks for the information about the cause.

Avast

Yes for the specific file. It didn't change anything.

I've tried on a variety of levels from just the file name to the entire Steam pathway.

Yep. Steam.exe -- called by the title Steam Client Bootstrapper -- is on the exclusion list since before this issue.

Did I mention it was only GalCiv -- both 2 and 3, by the way -- that is having the issue. So....

Could you guys hurry 4 along for me. I'd appreciate that.  

It's a false positive, the game's manual is large so an anti-virus might think there is something suspicious about it.

Well the problem with firewalls is you pay me money or you will be blacklisted. It has nonething to do with if the program is good or not, but are you willing to pay me money. Causing a lot of people to not use firewalls. Leaving computers vulnerable.

I kind of think the user manual should probably be a link to be a separate download.  This way, we wouldn't have this issue.

I too had this problem today. I don't think this is a Stardock problem or anti-virus issue; it's a Steam client issue with something about how one (or more) of their CDNs has stored the PDF file and subsequently corrupted it. (I'm in Ohio, so may not be a problem if you're not hitting East coast/ Midwest Steam servers?)

And like @AChallenge mentions above, I was able to keep clicking "Retry" over and over, getting another MB or two to download (sometimes 7MB at a time) from about 300MB to 660MB until Steam finally got the entire file downloaded and moved on to the rest of the game's files.