I love this site and this is my first post. Recently, in the last month or so, i have been having trouble shutting down or resetting my computer. I do not know of any drivers or software I might have installed or uninstalled that may have caused this. When I go to shut down my pc it goes there all the steps properly, saving settings and so on, it gets to windows is shutting down and it just hangs. If I manual turn of my computer and then turn it back on it boots up with no errors saying that windows did not properly shutdown so I’m not sure what the problem is. Any ideas would be appreciated.

I forgot to mention i am running windows xp pro with sp2.

In the BIOS under "Power Management" check you have "ACPI" turned on and "Power Saving" should also be turned on.

Hope this works for you.

are you sure it really hangs?

can you move your cursor or turn on/off num lock, etc

also go to device manager, look under Computer and see what that says, that shows us which HAL you are using and can often be the culprit of isssues like this

also try running sfc /scannow too, seems to fix alot of problems

You can use the SHUTDOWN COMMAND via the Run button. To get to this just click the start button and it should be there. Here is a link to more info on this commands abilities over at microsoft below. For quicker results you can copy and paste this for example shutdown -s -r -f -t 00

This will force all apps to close and the local computer will shutdown and restart immediately. You can remove the -r if you don't need to restart.

Click on the letter S to find more info on Shutdown command