It helps to know I am running ubuntu 8.04 with a nVidia GO 6800 (256MB) video.
As of the recent update, to Linux Games 7.1.0 steam won't load properly. When I click on the Steam GUI from my menu, I see the icon docked in my task tray, I can even click on it to bring up the drop down menu, but any attempts to get into steam GUI are met with failure. When this happens if I force kill the application I get a glimpse of the login screen for a brief second, sometimes when I load it I can see it for a second too before it disappears.
Looks like steam is loading and trying to display the steam login window, but for some reason that window simply does not remain vsisible.
So far I have tried to repair, uninstall/reinstall steam GUI. Even deleted and recreated the bottle without any improvement. I will play more tonight with some of the graphical settings and report here if I can get it working. Any other insight would be appreciated though :)