[Blackmane]

Try completely deleting the config and see if it rebuilds itself.

Hopefully that works, but if not you might have to delete Steam's main .gnf file for HL2 which would make it reinstall the whole thing.

And, I definetely recommend putting -console in the command line to bring up the console at the beginning. It removes the main menu load which is nice, and the only downside is you don't get the active background.