VISTA won't shutdown

[Guest clarke]

basically says it all

tries to shut down for hours, until I manually shutdown

then on restart I get error on shutdown

any ideas?

[cluberti]

Remove 3rd party apps with filter drivers (like antivirus, firewalls, antispyware realtime apps), go into msconfig and disable all non-Microsoft startup items and services, and try again?

There's only a few things that can cause a shutdown to fail, and most of them are either services that never shut down, or drivers that refuse to unload.