Windows XP takes forever to shutdown.

[hark]

In fact, just pressing the power button from the start menu makes the computer hang (before any of the options to shut down, restart, or sleep/hibernate come up). Then I have to ctrl+alt+del and shutdown from there. That works but it takes up to maybe five minutes just to shut down (or even restart). The system is perfectly fine otherwise and boots up quickly. Anyone have any ideas?

[Major_A]

Your hard drive may be going bad.

Reason I say this:
My brother in law's machine would take up to ten minutes to start up and shut down. I ran chkdsk and it came back fine. The SMART readings were all fine. Then it started to corrupt files and I still didn't know what was wrong. On a whim I took over one of my spare drives, installed Windows and all was right in the world again. If you have a spare drive you might want to see if you can duplicate the results.

[hark]

Well if that were the case, wouldn't Windows 7 also take forever to shut down? I forgot to mention that I also have Windows 7 installed (didn't think it would matter).

[Major_A]

Don't really know. What do your SMART readings report? Have you run chkdsk on the drive?

[hark]

Okay, here's an update. I was changing my graphics drivers and when graphics drivers were uninstalled, my machine went through the shutdown process perfectly fine. I then ran the driver installer and when I rebooted my machine, the same problem came up. I'll have to play around with the graphics, I suppose.

[Velo:Sity]

I had similar problem once or twice, didn't find any easy solution, reinstalled Windows (clean installation, repair didn't help either).

[hark]

Thank you all for your advice. I wasn't about to fix it, but I guess I can live with it.

edit: I've been playing around with processes and I got it to not hang when I press the shutdown button in the start menu. I'll do some further investigation and update if I find anything.

[kenc51]

Try these two links
Startup Shutdown Logon Logoff Status Messages
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/regs_edits/verbose.vbs

BootVis.exe Tool
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/...t/BootVis.mspx

Use bootvis to see what .dll files etc are not getting unloaded by the kernel when shutting down.
In most cases, it's AV or security software removing logs, deleting/overwriting the page file or doing a scan (All of which can normally be disabled in the software)