Waiting and still waiting...

Suggestions Please. I just ran scandisk and defragged my NTFS boot volume (C Everything appears to operate normally until I try to shutdown the machine. Where it used to pause for a couple of seconds at the "saving unsaved data do disk" screen now it takes several minutes to finally shutdown. What gives???

 

Rudy S - welcome to the forum. A little clarification if you would.

I just ran scandisk
Considering that 2K doesn't have scandisk (it uses chkdsk) please say exactly what you did - where you ran it from and what options you chose.

 

Ok, I use a suite of utilities from Ontrack Systems called Fix-It. They have a program called disk fixer which performs essentially the same checks as Checkdisk. No errors were found. I then ran the the defrag tool under computer management. The slow shutdown problem occured after the defrag was completed.

 

Well, Fix-it comes highly recommended so it isn't likely to have caused you problems. Have you also used their defragger on your system?

I've never seen or read of the XP defragger causing this sort of problem so can't offer a "fix" based on a known issue. Some thoughts though.

Several things known to cause slow shutdown are indexing (I'd suggest turning it off if you have it on since it also slows the system while you are using it) and NVIDIA Driver Helper Service. If you have NVIDIA video and that service is running, try stopping it then doing a shutdown. If your speed issue is cured, you can stop and disable the service since you really don't need it for anything.

Also check your event logs and see if any errors or warnings are being reported that look like they might pertain to the shutdown speed (or lack of speed).

If you are comfortable working with the registry, the default value for the PC to wait on an app or service that won't close is fairly long. I've never seen a problem with setting it shorter to speed up the process.

Start~run~Regedit then go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control and open "control"
Right click on "WaitToKillServiceTimeout ", select Modify, and lower the value you find (probably 2000)

Start~run~msconfig then click on the Startup tab. Uncheck all the items there except your AV program then reboot, log on, and shutdown. If it is back to normal speed then one of the items you unchecked is causing the problem. Try adding them back one at a time until you find the guilty party. If it turns out to be something you really do need to run at startup, post back because it will be lots easier to suggest a fix for a specific app.

 

Have you appllied any MS hotfixes lately? There's a known problem with Q329170 causing slow shutdown. I had this problem and removed the fix, ignoring dire warnings about is affecting umpteen zillion installed programs. It worked. Another possibility is that the pagefile is set to be cleared at shutdown - maybe YOU didn't set it - "Windows is like that ". See here for details.