Vista Freezes at Shutdown

[DaDude]

Occasionally, it happens where Vista freezes at Shutdown. It goes as far as the teal colored screen, where it displays "Shutting Down ... " and then remains there. The activity circle on the screen still continues to move though. I waited 10 minutes and nothing would happen, so I held the power button to force it to turn off.

I had my computer for about three months and this has occurred twice. What is causing this? I never had this problem with XP.

[+allan MVC]

If it only happens once in a while it's very difficult to diagnose. The only thing I can suggest is that you might have had one particular program or service running when the problem occurred that normally does not run, and that program is having trouble shutting down. You can do the following:

1) Start - Run - Regedit

Navigate to the following Registry key:

HKEY CURRENT USER\Control Panel\Desktop

Double click on the AutoEndTasks entry and replace the 0 with a 1 in the Value data text box

For the next two, if the dword value indicated does not exist, create it:

Double click on the WaitToKillAppTimeout entry in the right pane and change the Value data to 2000

Double click on the HungAppTimeout entry in the right pane and change the Value data to 1000

Reboot

2) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

Right-click on WaitToKillServiceTimeout and change it to 2000

[DaDude]

Just out of curiosity, what exactly is this supposed to do?

I tried your steps and I went to HKEY CURRENT USER\Control Panel\Desktop, but there wasn't any AutoEndTasks entry.

[+allan MVC]

The above entries will allow the OS to automatically close "stuck" tasks and will speed the shutdown of applications that are having shutdown problems. There is nothing in these changes than can cause any problems (except for the last - WaitToKillServiceTimeout - which theoretically could cause data not to be saved if the dependent service closes too quickly - but that's not a significant risk).

[Kami-]

+1 for the Solution :)