I played just a few weeks ago without any issues and for years before that without complications, but now I cannot really even start the game.

After launching Quake Live in Steam I get about 10 seconds of black screen and then 10 seconds of the Quake Live logo, after that I arrive in the main menu, but I cannot do anything really.
Steam FPS counters shows a constant 1 FPS and thus everything is extremely slow. Console opens about 10 seconds after clicking the bind on the keyboard, in-game menu items react in about 20 seconds.

Restarting Steam doesn't help 4 out of 5 times produce the same result, 1 out of 5 the game launches normally, but when I try to connect to a server FPS is back to 1. Every item takes about 5 seconds to load and I am disconnected from the server before the map loading is mid way through.

Restarting doesn't help, neither does reinstalling the game and steam itself. All other things run normally, steam related and others.

Any idea what is going on, has anyone come across something like this before?