I find that when im loading the game i can't use the steam community thing. i've come to accept that while stupid and anti-intuative it's something i just have to live with. no big deal.

then i saw peopel saying they can encode dvd's while playing Tf2 on thier multicore machines and so i was just wondering:

is it possible to load maps and stuff like that AND use the steam community thing without any problems if you have a multi core? and do any of them work, or only the quad core ones?

I have quad core, it's the same for me.

I just don't think they are designed to work at the same time.

Short answer: no.

You could alt tab out and do something else while the maps are loading (best to use windowed, noborder) but you can't access steam community while maps are loading (at least, not using the usual method).

so it is really just very veyr stupid

Yes.