Missing shut down/restart option

[old dog 2]

I have a computer setup for my 8 year old grandson running XP. Today I started it up to be sure all the updates were installed. When I was finished I wanted to shutdown. I clicked on the "Start" button in the lower left corner and it opened. Everything was there as it should be, but the options to shut down/restart etc. The only way to shut down was to turn the power off or hold the start button in on the cpu. I can not find a way to get the options back. Any ideas??
Thanks for any help!

[glc]

Ctrl-alt-del, shut down.

Try doing a system restore to get it back.

[old dog 2]

That did it. I had to go back 10 days. Why didn't I think of that.
Tjanks very much
PS guess I better do the update thing again!

[dektek11]

Or you could do a start->run->cmd: shutdown -r

But you got it, so good.

[old dog 2]

dektek11 I understand the command expect the -r. Will that restore options to "shutdown/restore", or would you have to type the command every time?

[dektek11]

I was just referring to shutting down/rebooting without having to hard boot it (using power switch). The flag -r just tells the shutdown command to reboot instead of complete shutdown. A good percent of the time when your computer has issues and you can't use the shutdown/restart buttons from start, you can use the shutdown command from prompt.

For instance, shutdown -f -r will force any running applications to close (which sometimes are the cause of system hangs) and reboot the computer after a 30 second countdown. You can use shutdown -r -t 01 to do the same thing, but after 1 second (01) instead of a countdown. From prompt, shutdown help will give all the options.

As for restoring your buttons, that depends on the issue. A lot of the time, a good reboot will fix it. If not, sometimes there are fixes or restores. But soft reboots are always better on your system than hard reboots. If, for some reason, you had to keep bouncing from prompt like this, just open notepad and type the command in (such as shutdown -r) and save as reboot.bat to wherever you want to keep it. Then just double click the icon whenever you want to run it.

[old dog 2]

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I will keep it in mind if it ever acts up again. When I restored to a earlier time did I lose any Windows updates installed after that restore point? I did do another update and SP3 was installed.

[glc]

Yes, you will lose any updates and anything else you have installed since the restore point. You will not lose data files.