why does “program not responding” freeze shut down on one machine but not on another?

Question

I often get "program not responding" issue on my Windows XP Pro machines during shut down. However, one machine just ignores it and shuts down. But the other essentially freezes until I manually say "end task", and that is very inconvenient.

Is this a known issue? Is this a matter of user specified OS settings, or hardware peculiarities or basically why would something like that happen?

Answer 1

This is configurable via a registry setting.

• Go to Start -> Run and type regedit in the box then press Enter
• Expand the treeview to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop

If the value AutoEndTasks isn't there already, you can create it. It should be a string value (REG_SZ).

• Setting it to 0 will disable it (tasks will have to be ended manually)
• Setting it to 1 will enable it (it will automatically end the programs for you)