XP Pro Slow Shut-down

[Argee]

Recently, I've experienced slow shutting-down times. Nothing mind-blowing, increased from, say, 20 seconds to, say, 50 seconds, but when anything different happens it sounds a warning bell to me.

It's Service Pack 2 plus all updates, running on a mirrored RAID. When shutting down, I used to click "OK" then a few seconds later I'd have the desktop icons disappear, then virtually immediately afterwards, the "Saving your settings" box would appear, remaining until the last seconds, when the screen would go "plain" (not blank), then shut down.

Now, I get the icon disappearance, then the "Saving your settings" which then itself disappears for maybe 20 seconds or so before re-appearing, then it shuts down as before. Hence, the extra time coincides with the disappearance and subsequent re-appearance of the "Saving your settings" box.

The shutdown wav. file is not corrupted, I've got no "roving profile" problems and I've disabled the "purge cache" service, as recommended. It's probably small fry in the overall scale of things, but I wondered whether anyone else had experienced this and/or overcome it.

TIA!

Ray.

 

[Sawdust]

I always put these kind of things down to Windows being Windows and just put up with it until it becomes a real problem and then rebuild.

Hardly a scientific approach I know but it's the only that has ever worked for me.

Mike

 

[TonyW]

My own system seems to take longer than it used to to . There are so many possibles, have you tried the following: (Info taken from my notes from other web sites)?

Is the Clear Pagefile at Shutdown option enabled.

When this option is enabled, it causes the system pagefile to be cleared upon clean shutdown. This takes considerable time of the Operating System to flush-out the pagefile. You may disable ClearPageFileAtShutdown option to improve shutdown times. But the pagefile.sys will be intact and accessible via other Operating System, in case or dual or multi-boot.
EDIT: Recommend back up of Registry before undertaking this

Start Registry Editor and navigate to the following key:

[HKLocalMachine\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]

Set ClearPageFileAtShutdown value to 0

Device Driver Problems

Problematic device drivers are another well-know cause for shutdown problems. To quickly check if your system contains devices with problematic drivers :

* Click the Start button
* Right-click "My Computer" and select "Properties"
* Click the "hardware" tab
* In the "Device Manager" section, click the "Device Manager" button

Windows shows the Device Manager with a complete list of all the hardware it finds in your computer. Look for any devices with an exclamation point or a question mark in a yellow circle. These are devices that have problems with their drivers and that can cause you a lot of trouble.

Keyboard
Some feature-rich keyboards or other input devices are known to cause trouble during the shutdown sequence. If you see any of those easy-replaceable, problematic (yellow circle) devices in your device manager, try replacing it with a more standard piece of hardware and test shutdown.

Sawdust makes a very good point - may be easier/safer to live with it if you can and tackle it again if it gets worse

Hope this of some help
Cheers
Tony

 

[Argee]

Thanks, Tony, but the "Clear Pagefile" was what I referred to as "Purge Cache," so that's done. The others don't apply. I will get to the bottom of it somehow - I'm either too tenacious or too anal to let it go.

Ray.

 

[TonyW]

Sorry Ray misinterpreted your reference to the purge cache. Hope I did not come across as a know-it-all - just trying to help based on recent personal experience. My own system suffered from driver issues. I am also thinking that IE7 may now be contributing to the slow shut down.

Sure you will find the solution soon - tenacious and anal are good - as far as PC's go.

Tony

 

[Blister]

Argee :wink:

Have you tried , right clicking on the bottom bar , then looking at " Task manager " to see what is running and using all your processor power ?

I had a nasty running on my laptop that was not detected by Norton , had one of the IT people sort it out and installed McAfee

no problems after that

 

[Argee]

Have you tried , right clicking on the bottom bar , then looking at " Task manager " to see what is running and using all your processor power ?

There was no processor activity prior to shutdown and Task Manager won't register after you've pressed the Shutdown command button. I've run Dr. Watson, but it hasn't created a log, so it doesn't recognise a problem.

However, I've now dealt with ctfmon.exe (a background utility which is part of Office, used for alternative inputs, such as speech to text). Whilst I'm not completely back to square one, even I (the archetypal fusspot) will live with the difference now.

Ray.

 

[Argee]

I picked up a tip recently on how to decrease the amount of time Windows XP takes to shut itself down. If you don't mind Registry editing, here it is:

The first part of this tweak deals with setting the amount of time Windows will take to kill open applications on shutdown.

Open REGEDIT and navigate to ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\’
Highlight the ‘WaitToKillAppTimeout’ value. Set it to ‘1000′.

Now highlight the ‘HungAppTimeout’ value. Set it to ‘1000′ also.

The second part of this tip changes the same settings, this time for all users on the system.

Open REGEDIT and navigate to ‘HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control
Panel\Desktop’
Highlight the ‘WaitToKillAppTimeout’ value. Set it to ‘1000′.

Now highlight the ‘HungAppTimeout’ value. Set it to ‘1000′ also.

In the third part of this tip, we will alter a second registry setting to decrease the amount of time Windows XP will wait before shutting down active services after receiving a shut down command.

Open REGEDIT and navigate to
‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Contr ol\’

Highlight the value ‘WaitToKillServiceTimeout’ Change this value to ‘1000.’

This should help to considerably speed up the time Windows XP takes to shut itself down.

HTH My shut-down time is now around 8 seconds.

Ray.

 

[TonyW]

Ray, Thanks for the registry tips - great - will give it a try

Cheers
Tony