Hangin on shut down

[RoyKelly]

My wife's computer has started hangin on shutdown about two weeks ago.

Her computer is a Gigabyte GA-7VAX m/b with an Athlon 1800+, 512 MB RAM, 14 GB and 10 GB Maxtor HDD - no software changes except Windows Update, no hardware changes, and I'm puzzled.

It went from shutting down in about 30 seconds to taking almost 5 minutes.

We have tried ensuring all programs are ended, and have also tried ending all procceses owned by the user. No change in shutdown.

Any suggestions?

[Tuf]

Log on as Administrator, not just an account with Admin priveleges, see what is running then. Try and shut down and see if it does it then.

You didn't say which OS you are using but if it's XP you can try to use System Restore if you have a point that far back.

If you have it set to clean out temp files and dump the prefetch files at shutdown it can add a fair amount of time to shutting down but not five minutes.

You most likely have a program or a file that is not closing properly.

[mike breck]

Hi Roy,

Also have a look at this page for the usual suspects

http://www.aumha.org/a/shtdwnxp.htm

HTH

[pam123]

Thanks Mike,
I needed that !

[RoyKelly]

Thanks for the help guys, especially Mike.

The link that Mike provided helped us. We found that the following cleared up the problem. How this got set is a mystery. We checked the Security Settings and disabled clearing the memory pagefile on shutdown and it went down in 10 seconds.

Correspondent Graeme J.W. Smith reported a more obscure cause of slow shutdown: In Win XP Professional, the Group Policy Editor has a security option to clear the pagefile at system shutdown. The same setting also forces the hibernation file to be wiped at shutdown. These processes take long enough that users may think that shutdown has hung. Since someone actually has to have set this policy, the problem will be pretty rare, but is worth mentioning. To change the setting, click Start | Run, type GPEDIT.MSC, click OK. Drill down to Computer Configuration | Windows Settings | Security Settings | Local Policies | Security Options. In the right pane, find “Shutdown: Clear virtual memory pagefile.”