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I have had quite a few people tell me lately that they are having problems shutting down their systems. It seems that the screen comes up saying "Windows is shutting down" and then just stays there forever. This is happening with both Windows XP and Vista systems. I'm beginning to wonder if a recent update from Microsoft may be the culprit.
In any case, can anyone suggest a way to track the shutdown process to help determine where the problem lies?
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The only thing that worked for me was uninstalling IE7 and installing IE6... 3 days now and all is well
ctrl + alt + del as we all know can force a shut down of unresponsive programs. It presents a shut down tab as well.
but yeah the event viewer will provide helpful hints.
ie7 can be an issue, as it is more for the vista. i am using ie7 for both the xp and the vista, and in both cases the shut down process is not a problem.
hope you find your solution.
have seen reports of Adobe running when not in use & being slow to release machine as it tries for last minute update during shutdown.
Same for any programs that do very frequent auto updates (AV ,Win Live update, etc. Any set to update at closing rather than start-up.
Possible also programs doing constant background scans of machine in mid scan. Also always live items like MS Radio bar w/net connections.
Scan machine machine for malware which might be trying to send it's accumulated findings home to it's maker/master at shutdown. 
I'm having the same problem. How does one know what is running in the background or what is being updated? Will the Task Manager give you that information?
Thanks................
redrose451
Dell Dimension, 8200 Windows XP SP2
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