slow shutdown

sometimes when I shutdown it takes the computer a long time to actually turn off. I ran spyware programs and it has improved but on occassion it is still slower than should be and when this occurs, very briefly a box pops up for "ending" a program even though there was no program running. Any suggestions?

 

If there is a box popping up the program must have been loaded in the memory even if you were not using it-it must not have closed down properly.

Before closing down do a CTRL-ALT-DELETE and browse the processes loaded in the memory. You may find there are more loaded there than you think.

I am running XP with sufficient memory and doing that just now showed I have 66 processes loaded in the memory at the moment. That is a lot to close if I told the computer to shutdown.

 

Good news. Microsoft feels your pain. They have fix to shutdown faster.
Go to the link and download User Profile Hive Cleanup Service.

Brief Description
A service to help with slow log off and unreconciled profile problems.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1B286E6D-8912-4E18-B570-42470E2F3582&displaylang=en

I have used it on about 20 computers and it worked on every one.