10 minutes to shutdown !?!? 1

[J741]

I recently timed my shutdown sequence from the time I clicked Start - Shut Down - Turn Off.

Within 15 seconds I saw multiple messages incating things like "logging off", "saving your settings", and "Windows is shutting down". During this time I also heard the shutdown sound.

9 minutes and 55 seconds later, the hard drive activity indicator light dimmed, the screen stopped displaying "windows is shutting down", and the computer's power finally turned off.

The complete startup and login only takes about 40 seconds, so why would it take 10 minuted to shut down !?!?

What tools are available to help me troubleshoot this issue?

- James.

 

[zofo00]

Is there any software or utility that you have recently installed or removed.
I would suggest that you use taskmanager to see which applications are running just before you log off anmd try to singleout the one causing problems
do you have NERO and some Legacy drivers cause this problem.

Here's a link as suggested by linney to me when i hd a similiar problem

http://www.auhma.org/a/shutdown.htm

 

[Und3rtak3r]

Also to realy slow down the shutdown..
Enable "Clear page file on shutdown" in the registry.. ouch
zofo00's comments are a very good start

 

[bcastner]

Start a CMD session and type:

shutdown -f -s

Does it still take ten minutes?

If not you have a process that is not closing, or closing very, very slowly. Either find a way to modify the activity of the process, or put the above line in a batch file on your desktop.

Be sure as well to check your Power Options setting in Control Panel to enable Advanced Power. If it is already enabled, try disabling it and testing again.

 

[J741]

Thanks for the link zofo00, but it was not correct. I found the right one at

http://aumha.org/a/shutdown.htm

and an even better one at

http://aumha.org/win5/a/shtdwnxp.htm

Und3rtak3r, thanks for the input. I had already disabled the "clear pagefile on shutdown option" and it made no difference.

bcastner, the command you provided resulted in a total of 20 seconds for the entire shutdown process. Thank you very much!

Now to try and figure out exactly what process is causing the delay during a normal shutown procedure.

- James.

 

[J741]

*** PROBLEM SOLVED ***

After determining that it was a service causing the problem, I hit ctrl-alt-del to start the task manager, selected the processes tab, and foced an "end process" on five randomly selected processes (writing down the names of the processes I had killed). Then I shut-down and re-booted the PC, repeating this process until the shutdown took only about 20 seconds. Once I had isolated 5 processes, it was a simple matter to isolate those 5 one at a time until I found the culprit. It was a process named "INSTAN~1.exe".

Next I had to figure out what program was associated with "INSTAN~1.exe". Using the startup tab in MSCONFIG, I found that "INSTAN~1.exe" was associated with a program called TextBridge. Using the "add/remove programs" in the control pannel, I found "TextBridge Pro 8.0" (which Windows XP told me I last used over a year ago) and un-installed it. Now shutdown takes only about 20 seconds.

Thanks for all your help everyone!

- James.