Yesterday evening I was playing TF2 just fine, but today it suddenly crashes every time right after the little Valve intro movie. So after some troubleshooting I decided to reinstall Steam and TF2. After trying about 10 times it finally started downloading the game (kept saying the servers where too busy), but with a whopping 30kb/s..
Overall Steam suddenly feels very non responsive and even made my whole system freeze up.. Is it just because of the F2P games or is it my system?

Steam Summer Sales. 100 000 people downloading games at once. You could try a different DL server.

Yepp same happened to me after buying BFBC2