Eheh, time has done it, I've found a way to do this so I thought I'd share it for those who are interested I use a rebooter in combination with psexec (sysinternals tool) and sleep.exe to go through My main logoff script copies the rebooter batch file to windows\temp then calls it with this command psexec -d "c:\windows\temp\rebooter.bat" rebooter.bat IF (%1)==() goto relaunch goto doreboot :relaunch psexec -d c:\windows\temp\rebooter.bat truc goto eof :doreboot sleep 15 shutdown -r -t 00 -f :eof exit Of course it's not a really clean way to do it, but it works... Psexec completely detach the rebooter batch from the logoff process, so finishing the logoff does not kill the batch, and once logoff is finished, shutdown command is accepted at last ... a whole day to find this trick, but now it's available to everyone