Win Vista SP2 won't shut down

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I’m running Vista Home Premium on a user-built machine and it has been running just fine for a few years. I’ve recently purchased the Win7 copies I need and will soon be working on that. But meanwhile my machine works fine until shutdown. Log off is fine, hit the shutdown button and I get a few seconds of intense harddrive activity, then nothing. I’ve let it run for as long as an hour with no difference. In the end I have to manually shut the machine off which Windows lets me know it didn’t like upon the next boot. This all started around 3/11/10.

The only 2 things that happened immediately prior to this are: 1-a major windows update and 2- I transferred my entire OS from a WD740 Raptor to a WD1500 Raptor.

Things I tried without success:
1-Turned off all services other than MS services – no change
2- Use System Restore – since it could not reboot, the restore failed. If I tried to reboot manually at the proper time, it also failed.
3- Reset the CMOS and restored info in the BIOS – no change
4- There are no hardware problems in Device Mgr.

Is there something else I can try?
Gary

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Clean install Win 7 and have fun. Win 7 the OS MS wanted when they developed Vista, and when customized correctly, faster than XP, in my opinion. Did you change from the smaller to larger HD just to have a bigger hd or because of problems with the smaller hd? Did you imageVista and install image on larger hd or just an old fashioned reinstall? It does sound as though your Vista OS is corupt. I would also look at the RAM, and PS. Also it’s possible a fan is not spinning properly causing the CPU to overheat. What are the power requirements of the new hd? Is the PS big enough?

Since you are in a position where you recently bought a bigger hd and are installing an OS on it, this is an opportune time to install a real new OS, Win 7.

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There’s a utility in XP (User Profile Hive Cleanup Utility) for this sort of thing but it doesn’t run in Vista so

You could try a round of driver updates or at least check out the optional driver updates for any of your hardware that may be available from Windows Update. Be sure WU has correctly identified the make and model of hardware before letting it install though (it sometimes doesn’t get the graphics card correctly identified).

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Thanks Ted and Byron for the fast help. While I do have a lot of power consuming units (4 hdds, big video cd not SLI, 2 DVDs, and ASUS P5k3 mbd with lots of software such as Adobe CS3) the PS hasn’t complained. It’s a 1000W Antec Quattro. THe switch to a larger hd was because I was down to 100MB freespace left on the smaller one and was tired of walking the line, transferring data to another hd to last another couple of days. My CPU does heat up occasionally but I added a couple of new door fans to take care of that. I transferred an image from the smaller to the larger hd and it must have gotten corrupt as you mentionned. I recently (about a month ago) updated my drivers going to the manufacturers web sites so I don’t think that’s a problem. Oh well, it just looks like I need to set aside the time needed to upgrade the machines in my LAN to Win7 sooner than I anticipated. The manual shutdowns won’t corrupt data on my logical partitions, will it? That’s where I keep anything really important.

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Does shutdown stiil hang from safe mode? If not,try

How to troubleshoot configuration errors by using the System Configuration utility in Windows XP

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=310560

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Thanks for the suggestion, Witalka. It does hang in safe mode. I used msconfig when I was messing around with all the non-Windows services but I will try the troubleshooting modes suggested. What’s also very strange is that last night when shutting down the machine performed perfectly normally! This morning things were back to the usual misbehavior. Something is behaving erratically although this is the first time this has happened since it starting acting up. I was thinking that it was shutdown.exe itself but I guess this disproves that idea.

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I’m running Vista Home Premium on a user-built machine and it has been running just fine for a few years. … Log off is fine, hit the shutdown button and I get a few seconds of intense harddrive activity, then nothing. I’ve let it run for as long as an hour with no difference. In the end I have to manually shut the machine off which Windows lets me know it didn’t like upon the next boot. This all started around 3/11/10.

Is there something else I can try?
Gary

More info, please.

Your copy of Vista is up to date with service packs, meaning you’re running SP2? Any new hardware or software of any kind installed around the time this issue first surfaced? Have you tried running a clean boot of the system to see if the shutdown issue exists in that operating state as well?

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Thanks for your post, Alan. I am running Vista SP2 and in my first post, second paragraph, I mentionned I switched harddrives to increase space for C drive.
The issue occurs in booting to safe mode and in a clean boot. I haven’t tried to determine which MS service might be acting up. There are a few I’ve turned off or switched to manual but that was weeks before the issue started. I’ve tried switching them back to automatic one at a time but they had no effect on the issue. I simply don’t know what services or dlls are interdependent with shutdown.exe, or the steps in shutdown’s code that may be interferred with by some other code. As far as Norton, Spybot, Ad-Aware and a-square are concerned, my machine’s clean.

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