XP takes forever to shut down
 

This isn't life or death, but it's annoying.

I have a fair amount of programs running in Windows XP, but the machine has pretty decent horsepower and a gig of memory.

If I start up and shut down within a few minutes, everything seems to be okay. However, after the computer has been on for awhile, when I hit "start" and "shut down" I am privileged to stare at an hourglass for about a minute before I'm presented with the opportunity to hit "turn off."

At first I thought it was a non-responsive background program, but I never get a message saying so, and if I cancel the first shutdown, and try again, it takes just as long.

Anyone have any ideas, or suggestions on how to get to the bottom of it?

Thanks.

This is a tweeking program i use http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/S...H-TuneXP.shtml
It certainly cut my shut down and start up time. Might be worth a look.

Before you shutdown, go to the Taskmanager and take at look at which process is taking up alot of CPU and memory.

Thanks for the suggestions. (Got bogged down with taxes--sorry to take so long.)

Svchost took up the most memory, but when I checked CPU usage, 97% was in use by "system idle."

I have a feeling that's the problem, but it would be nice if someone who actually knows what they're doing (meaning, someone other than myself) offered some advice.

Thanks again.

System idle means the cpu cycles are not being used. My advice: manually close down everything nonessential (through TaskManager), then try again. That ought to tell you if a rogue program is the problem. You can also try to manually shut down as many services as you can---maybe you will hunt down one that isn't working right. You can access this list by going to Run (Win+R) and type in services.msc and press enter.

If you messed with windows configurations (Using TuneUp Utilities for instance) you might have checked the option to delete the paging file on shutdown. This could cause a rather prolonged shutdown.

Finally figured it out. However, I learned a few things en route-tried Tune XP and a program someone somewhere suggested called Currprocess.

However, the problem was somehow related to a KVM switch I have. Once I finally farted around with that a little bit, the problem went away.

Thanks for the suggestions. Like I said, I learned from them.

I know you've already fixed your problem, but I used to have the same problem due to mapped network drives. For some reason Windows would just sit there and hang trying to unmount network drives. As I recall...I ceased having this problem when I set up a Linux/Samba file server.

...And then I ditched Windows on my desktop too and switched to NFS ;-)