Very slow shut down

thanx for ur reply mark. yes i have antispyware, antivirus, and firewall running. I have zonealarm security suite which actually was the first thing i installed on my laptop and my indexing service was already off and i dont have that many processes running. i think i might have figured out the problem. The first day i got it i installed a chinese language pack. i went to microsoft's site and they said people have these problems if they install an east asian language pack. so now my question to u or anyone who can help is how does one uninstall a language pack?

Control Panel>Regional and Language Options

i went the the regional and language options but then do i just uncheck the languages? i think i need to get the whole simplified chinese thing out of my whole computer.

and see if it helps.

I do know one thing about ZoneAlarm. Ever since its version 6 upgrade it has bloated enormously. I use ZA Pro myself but I have turned off its anti-virus and anti-spyware options because I use other smaller AV and AS utilities. But even so, since I upgraded to version 6 some time ago, (we are now at v7), shut down has taken longer.

Did you say how many processes are running in the Task Manager?

Mark

there are currently 33 processes running including firefox and trillian and those two i usually close before shutting down my computer. oh by the way i have more processes running on another older computer that doesnt even have 1 gig or ram and shut down is just fine.

well your right mark. it turned out to be zonealarm. i uninstalled it and removed some of its "remnants" from the system32 folder and then i restarted and the computer restarted and i mean fully restarted in under 20 seconds!! that totally beats the 3 mins i got last night just to shutdown. so basically by uninstalling zonealarm my shutdown and even my startup time increased. actually i just opened trillian right now and it opened so fast as opposed to the near 30 second wait i had to go through before. you know zonealarm gave me problems on another computer of mines because it blocked the network. well i guess now im going to install spysweeper, avira antivir, and commodo firewall.

although I am kinda sorry that it has proved to be ZoneAlarm in your case. As a firewall it has proved over the years to be a pretty good product, at least for us non-expert users.

But by adding functions like anti-virus and anti-spyware, and changing it's internal checks to cover many more processes, it has become bigger and more cumbersome.

When I added an external USB hard disk to my system some months ago it worked fine for a while. Then ZA was updated and I didn't realize that the upgrade had turned on both the anti-virus and the anti-spyware feature automatically. Suddenly connecting up the external disk slowed down my computer, and trying to explore the disk caused what I thought were freezes. I use the external as a second, short-term, backup, and unknown to me everytime I attached the drive ZA was virus and spyware checking it. It wasn't until I tuned these off after found that they had been turned on that I got my system back to normal.

If you haven't yet installed a new firewall, and if you were using ZA Pro with these features, perhaps you could try re-installing ZA but then turn off the anti-virus and anti-spyware, and just use ZA as a firewall. Also turn off it's email checking feature.

But that's your own choice of course.

Good luck.

Mark

well zonealarm has been giving me too many problems on this laptop so ill leave zonealarm security suite on my desktop computer and keep the commodo firewall here. commodo is actually a very good firewall. By the way if you're just using the zonealarm firewall then instead of turning off the anti-spyware and anti-virus why not just uninstall the whole thing and install zonealarm firewall the free version. it might not slow down ur PC like the pro does. I'm always switching my security softwares so I'll probably install zonealarm firewall free edition soon but for now im sticking to comodo firewall. by the way since u turned off your antispyware and antivirus for zonealarm i hope you installed some new antispyware and antivirus.

I purchased ZA Pro for two reasons. Firstly I had been using the free version for a number of years, and thought it was time to pay back,

The other reason is that the Pro version has some nice features, like IP tracking, a Whois to help find the people who are trying to hack me. I have rarely used that feature though. Even if I know who these people are, there is little I can do about it. They will just move on.

I suspect the free version is now just as bloated as the paid version,so I will stick with the paid version for now.

I have used AVG Free anti-virus for some time. I should really use their paid version. Perhaps soon. For anti-spyware I use Windows Defender, Spybot, SpywareBlaster and Ewido, (now AVG anti-spyware), but only Windows Defender runs continuously, I use the others as backup checks. I also have a small utility, just a few KB in size called Startup Monitor. All it does is warn me if anything is trying to set itself to run at startup. I like it because of its size but as Windows Defender and, (I believe), ZoneAlarm do the same, I reckon I might have overkill there.

I also use CCleaner to clean out all temporary files, history and TIF's, (Temporary Internet files). Ohh, and I run rootkit revealers occasionally.

I'm not paranoid. I am a stable, well-balanced person!

Mark

A really good way to stay pretty secure is to access the internet from inside a virtual machine. Initially its a pain to setup but once you have it done, its actually quite comforting to know you can have your VM handle everything and not worry about the host becoming infected. I also used Policies and such to lock the machine down, and only allow a few goings on (Internet and thats it) so there is no need even for AV or Firewall inside the VM.

If it gets infected or corrupt you just revert to a snapshot.