@5, maybe I'm being too paranoid, but asking people to remote into your machine for something like this is imho a bad idea. Get the wrong person to do it and they will take your username and password, and who knows what else. I really don't like the idea of strangers remoting into my machine personally. I've seen too many bad things happen when people have access to passwords.
@6 so far as I know that's right. What kinds of things have you tried to get it to display the alternate interface?
Have you, as a test, tried killing steam.exe in task manager and relaunching it using your -no-dwrite shortcut? If that fixes it, then check to see if Steam is starting with Windows, and if so, disallow that.
I also see a steam client service, but I'm not sure if that has anything to do with it. I never had to touch it, so I kinda doubt that has an effect on this.
Make more of less, that way you won't make less of more!
If you like what you're reading, please give a thumbs-up.