Thanks for all your help with this, Nike-It!
From what I can figure, there must be some portion of Valve's STEAM Distribution Application built into that particular patch. It makes sense, because you wouldn't want the program's patching process to undo the digital rights management/copy protection scheme.
From a developer's standpoint, this really has to be a nightmare, because it seems that a different patch is needed for every protection scheme. It would be ideal if these protection schemes could develop some sort of common plug-in interface like Microsoft's DirectX did for audio, video, and input devices. The developers could create a single version of the application's patch, and the copy protection could be applied later as a separate executable.
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