Running Vista on my Toshiba laptop for several years now. Recently, I noticed it will not restart - I have to power cycle it. I have enabled Verbose Status messages, so I know it's stuck at "Stopping services". Is there a way to figure out which service is not stopping? I'm hoping for some kind of log like the bootlog.
I've tried looking through the event viewer - no luck there.
So I had to do this the old-fashioned way, uninstall recent applications, re-boot and see if Vista still hangs during shutdown. Sure would have been nice to have a shutdown log, just like the boot log, to help the debug this!
I did find the culprit - Juniper Networks Network Connect 6.2.0 (otherwise a very fine product!) is not compatible with Vista Ultimate SP2 / IE8. Oh well - maybe Windows 7 someday?
You might find information buried in your Event Viewer.
(right-click Computer, select Manage, expand Event Viewer)
I think that once again Process Explorer can come to the rescue. You may have to make it replace the windows Task Manager (Options->Replace Task Manager) in order to open it during the shutdown process, but it may be of help.
You may also want to try Process Monitor. You may have to use File->Run... from Process Explorer or **New Task...* from Task Manager to launch it, but it should tell you what kind of activity is taking place on your system.
Try to kill process one by one until it's can restart. In some case I have this problem with corrupted graphics drivers.
