Hang at shutdown

[goombawaho]

My personal computer has decided to start acting weird. It's an ASUS P8H77-V board with 16GB RAM, Win7 64-bit. It just started to intermittently NOT shut down when I tell it to shut down.

Sometimes you can barely see (very dim on the display) the words LOGGING OFF and it hangs for a few minutes before shutting down. Sometimes the screen is totally black but the monitor doesn't go to sleep. Either way, if you power the machine down by holding the power button, you get a "Windows did not shut down successfully" on next startup so I know Windows 7 didn't shut down fully.

Not really sure what to test for hardware or how to approach if software. There is a BIOS update one newer than mine, but I hate to do that.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[hairlessupportmonkey]

I would update the BIOS and run windows updates.

Try a sfc /scannow and see if you have any system corruption.

ACSS - SME
General Geek

 

[goombawaho]

Already did SFC (nothing found) and don't need any updates at the moment. PC was built in February 2013 and this just started happening. Strange. Haven't installed any new software either. Very static environment.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[hairlessupportmonkey]

on some older boards, i still have an asus p8p67 pro the intel sata controllers degraded over time. i know the intel controller on mine is shot. luckily it has two other controllers built into it too.


ACSS - SME
General Geek

 

[MikeHalloran]

Maybe it's an update gone wrong.

My HP laptop, not yet two years old, has started to display 'Shutting Down', well, indefinitely, on attempts to shut down Win7Pro64.

 

[goombawaho]

I have updated the BIOS to latest version so we'll see what happens. Strangely enough it seems to have stopped misbehaving right after I posted this thread, but I'll keep an eye on it after my Christmas Day BIOS update.

I was anxious about the BIOS update because previously it could break your Intel Rapid Storage Technology RAID setting as part of the update resetting the BIOS. But this did not happen.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[Beilstwh]

not a big deal. Since I loaded the most current Microsoft patches (about 6 months ago) it can take 5 minutes to shutdown but I don't care. If shuts down successfully and it starts up clean which is all I care about. Also the only time I shut down anymore is to install patches, otherwise I put the machine to sleep instead.

Bill
Lead Application Developer
New York State, USA

 

[goombawaho]

It hung yesterday, so problem was not solved by BIOS update.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[kjv1611]

Is it feasible/desirable to try System Restore and set it to a point that will definitely be before the issue began? That might help narrow it down to being hardware vs software.

"But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." 1 Corinthians 15:57

 

[SamBones]

I've seen those symptoms when a program in the background is not closing when you give the command to shut down. Some programs will cause Windows to give a warning and let you kill it, but I've seen some programs just hang the shut down like you're describing.

A while back I had an odd Firefox plugin that I was testing. For some reason it stuck around even after Firefox was shutdown. It had that affect that it would hang the shutdown. Unfortunately that kind of thing can take a lot of time to track down. Try checking TaskMgr to see what's running and maybe manually kill some things before shutting down to see if that gives yo a clean shutdown.

Also, try checking your event logs. There might be something in either the Application or System event logs to give you a clue.

 

[goombawaho]

Not really feasible to do a system restore - too long ago for me to remember when it started happening. It happened once like two months ago, disappeared and then reappeared. So, it was like - "Oh, that was just a fluke after the first time".

Yeah, I've looked at Process Explorer and nothing really new running from what I see. There are "not responding" errors in the event log, but I haven't tried to correlate them to days when it doesn't shut down properly. Unfortunately, it's not that simple to say that something not responding at shutdown time is the REASON for the hang. I'll keep noodling it.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[BobMCT]

We've had a rash of Win 7 systems that were stuck on attempting to get M$ updates. When I say stuck, I mean hours+. We had to do lots of manually updates and KB fixes to get by and now things seem OK. Apparently M$ "broke" something in a Sept-ish update. Check technet and search for update hangs and you should find plenty. Good luck

 

[goombawaho]

It's nothing to do with UPDATES. It's just shutting down where there are no updates and no updates have been installed.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[Beilstwh]

Interesting enough, I have a Windows 7 machine. I have no problems patching the machine but when I reboot the machine it can take 15 minutes to finally shut down. The machine is totally patched with all current patches.[highlight #FCE94F][/highlight]

Bill
Lead Application Developer
New York State, USA

 

[goombawaho]

This may be something broken by a Microsoft update. I hadn't had one minute of trouble with this computer and then boom, there it is. So, we'll wait and see. It's only about 3 minutes max for my machine and it will shutdown if you just leave it alone.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[edfair]

Anything listed twice in device manager, particularly network drivers? Recall one machine having problems shutting down 2nd instance because the first close took something away.

Any evidence of what might be the issue if you leave task manager open while it is shutting down?

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[goombawaho]

I'll check it out again but things looked "normal" or just as previous to the problem when I last looked.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[goombawaho]

The same problem just started happening on my Windows 7 laptop. And, I had a customer tell me today he was experiencing the same thing on his Windows 7 laptop. So, this must be related to a Microsoft update. Oh the joy.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[Beilstwh]

I found out why my machine was taking so long. By default when the computer shuts down it overwrites the pagefile with binary zeros. That was taking almost 10 minutes on my machine. I turned off that behavior and the workstation now shuts down in about 5 seconds. The registry key is

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\ClearPageFileAtShutdown

and the REG_DWORD needs to be changed from 1 to 0

I don't know if this will help you but it made a major difference in my shutdown.


Bill
Lead Application Developer
New York State, USA

 

[goombawaho]

It's already set to ZERO in the registry. I had actually never even heard of that option before, so not a wasted reply. Interesting.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.