Quote by voodoo47:

nobody ever said the install was proper. god knows from where those three crfs in the root come from - they are way too small to be the full resource files.

//maybe the user installed some mods (improperly)?

Nope, those files are there automatically. I did not install or unpack any files to base folder. Checked it from two computers ...

and ss2tool of any version was not used at any point, correct?

Quote by voodoo47:

and ss2tool of any version was not used at any point, correct?

No ss2tool was used, and the mods seem to be working alright ... at least so far.

ok, so now we actually don't know whether the DataPermMods and DataTempMods folders were present in the default steam install (steam posts suggest that they are). it would be quite helpful if you could create a fresh steam install to confirm this.

I see 5 .crf files in that screenshot.
I had the same files in the root dir when I had installed the old version of the German patch.

Code:
02.06.2011  16:11            24.729 iface.crf
02.06.2011  16:11             5.551 intrface.crf
02.06.2011  16:11           186.490 mesh.crf
02.06.2011  16:11            20.513 obj.crf
02.06.2011  16:11           117.674 strings.crf
Don't recall how I had installed the german patch (old version of SS2Tool ?), but I use the CD version of the game, not any online version.