Shutdown behaviour with W7

Apologies in advance is there is an obvious way to do this but I can't find it.

In XP, when you wanted to shut down the system, you told it to do so and, if anything was blocking shutdown the process would simply pause until you had attended to the matter - usually just a matter of clicking a save button.

With W7 MS seem to have gratuitously and royally fouled the procedure up because now, if something is blocking shutdown, unless you can get to it very quickly the whole shutdown is halted and you have to abandon it, close the offending app and then restart the shutdown. This can happen several times if you have a lot of apps open and have forgotten which ones have not been 'saved'.

Is there any way of getting W7 to behave in a more helpful fashion, or, failing that, is anyone aware of a utility that will shut down all apps so that their CanClose handlers get prodded?

 

How fascinating.

Does anyone know the answer to the question?

 

I can't offer you a solution Moglex but can warn you if you find one that it could be risky and cause loss of data. These programs are asking for user input for a reason, not just to annoy you.

As Steve posted, close your apps before you shut down.

 

I don't think that you read the question properly.

I know perfectly well that the apps need closing properly. The problem is that nowadays one can have many apps open and with W7's taskbar it's a lot harder to quickly scan and see what is open.

I wasn't asking for something that would force shutdown - W7 offers that option itself.

All I want is behaviour as XP where the shutdown process continues except for applications that require user intervention so that you simply need to answer the save/don't save/cancel questions and once the last one is dealt with the system shuts down.

The current situation is a classic case where something that worked perfectly well in XP has been needlessly broken in order to show an almost useless fancy screen. In fact, the only extra utility the new method has provided is the extremely dangerous one you have just cautioned against - namely allowing users to force a shutdown of tasks that are awaiting input!

 

Ok, it's clearer now and makes sense, I still can't offer a solution though, sorry