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My windows XP machine is very reluctant to shut-down. It will often get stuck on the "Windows is Shutting Down..." screen or a bit further on with just a blank screen, all the fans are still running and often the hard-drive too. I have to resort to a manual power-down. How can I diagnose what the problem is?

Shuttle SN25P AMD 4200 Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core

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Someone move this over please – Sam Mackrill Jul 15 '09 at 16:09
this question look the same: superuser.com/questions/7557/… – Drake Jul 30 '09 at 14:01
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migrated from serverfault.com Jul 30 '09 at 13:46

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4 Answers

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A single reluctant process can slow down or halt the shutdown process. Best thing to do is analyze running processes/services, for example with HijackThis and Process Explorer, and kill the unnecessary ones.

Reboot and repeat until the shutdown process becomes smooth.

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up vote 1 down vote

Disable all unnessary startup apps via Autoruns and Make sure the drivers and XP are up to date.

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up vote 1 down vote

The behaviour can happen if your system gets hung on some process or service and is uanble to write to the hard drive.

Check event viewer and see if service is failing to stop. The event named Eventlog should be the last log before your system halts.

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up vote 0 down vote accepted

Upgrade to Window-7

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