Hi, I appreciate the help. The only problem is, the 300 corrupted files were on my game files, which were actually working perfectly fine. The game won't launch or do anything except continue updating for me. However, I am now at 83% after waiting all day. My friend and I discussed that if we couldn't figure out his problem for him by the time my client re-downloaded the entire game (for no reason) that we would have to just forget about it.
As for my friend, we were playing Left 4 Dead 2 through steam yesterday for a few hours, he plays Civ 5, Dead Island, Skyrim, etc. all from the steam panel. This problem is only with Age of Conan. He isn't the most technically savvy, but I know for a fact that all of these newer (in some cases fairly demanding) titles work flawlessly on his machine.
Alas, this will be the second time I downloaded the entire game when it wasn't even necessary and this is just combined with the fact that it won't get past this loop on his machine. We want to play through the steam panel for many reasons. Unfortunately, if we cannot get this to work through steam we will not be playing. This saddens me, especially because I got so excited after looking at my account from in-game and logging on my main. I almost pondered going premium right then, but I thought I would wait for my friend to launch today and see how things are, see if the game interested him, etc. I am really glad that I didn't act on instinct! So far this has been a disaster. Five hours later and we are still trying to get the game to even work for him AND it is re-downloading the entire game for me, when it was working perfectly before and didn't even need to re-download the entire client.
Still trying to find anything in old threads that might help us, but we are running out of options for him, as well as time to continue troubleshooting this issue. I just really hoped for a better re-introduction to AoC.