"Failed to Start Game"

[Sentenal]

I recently bought Project Zomboid on Steam, and I'm having problems with it whenever I die or just close out of the program.  For some reason, the game never terminates itself after I close out of it.  I'll be kept in the "In-game: Project Zomboid" status until I kill Steam and restart it.  When I try to launch a new game when this is happening, I get an error message saying "Failed to Start Game (App already running)".  Steam tries to help by directing me to a page for a Missing Executable problem, but that is not my problem, nor have the steps there helped.

[EnigmaGrey]

it should terminate after a minute or two -- for whatever reason, it's sometimes rather slow in doing so.

[Sentenal]

Its been about 15 minutes or so, and it still hasn't ended, as far as Steam is conserned.

 

I'll try to elaborate more as to what is going on. As far as I can tell, the game itself is closing and terminating on my computer.  The window is gone, the process is gone from task manager, etc.  However, Steam isn't recognizing it as terminated.  Steam thinks the game is still going.  My status is still getting listed as "In Game".  And because of that, I can't load the game again, without going into task manager, and ending the process on Steam, and then restarting Steam.