Mint 17.3 Steam Crashing

This has been a weird one. Sometimes, I will launch Steam, it will stop responding from time to time, and then brings up an error with all [] blocks (like it doesn't recognize the font for that window) then all of Cinnamon crashes, and I can't start a new Terminal. This will often happen when I start Steam, close the "new games / deals" window, and then it does this.

The system in general seems OK, and I played FTL ok once. Is it an OpenGL issue, other dependencies that Steam games (like Metro, Bioshock Infinite, or TF2) needs that I don't have?

Just want to get this thing up, running, and gaming successfully.

Thoughts?

There have been some recent updates to steam that have caused some locale (the LANG environment variable) issues for me. Never had them before. They aren't debilitating for me.

Try launching steam from the terminal and see what it is outputting

What video card is in this system?

780ti running the recommended nVidia Driver. I actually managed to get Portal 2 and TF2 to run fine last night. It seemed like when I let the downloads all complete before launching anything, it works better. So perhaps it was an issue with the command to suspend or continue downloads when a game launches.

I'll keep you posted if further crashes happen. Thank you.