Windows 7 stuck on shutting down

Question

I have a toshiba laptop with windows 7 home edition. Over the past 2 or 3 weeks, the process of windows shutting down has become slower and slower. A couple of days ago, it stopped altogether. Whenever I hit the shut down button in the start menu, it logs me off as usual, goes to the "Shutting Down..." screen, and then just freezes. The rotating progress indicator stops moving, nothing happens, and the computer doesn't shut down.

The first time this happened I left it for half an hour, nothing happened. I have to hold the power button each time to get it to turn off.

When I reboot after holding the power button like this, windows doesn't give me the usual "windows didn't shut down correctly" message, it just boots normally.

I have scanned for viruses and haven't installed any new drivers or anything I think could have caused this problem over the past few weeks it's started to happen.

What is the problem and how can I solve it?

Answer 1

It actually was in fact a corrupted page file. What worked for vista in the linked question works for windows 7 as well, apparently.

I'm not sure why windows was taking so long to shut down before the point where it stopped shutting down, or if that's even related.

For future reference:

To solve this problem I went to system settings > advanced tab > performance > virtual memory, then disabled paging. (I selected "no page file." Setting the size to 0mb apparently doesn't work). Then, I enabled paging again. After a reboot, everything was fine. Windows didn't get stuck anymore and was able to shut down.