Resolved Unwanted shutdown

I have set up Win7 and an IR remote on my streaming computer. At first this worked well, but now for some reason the remote seems to be receiving random shutdown commands. I have not been able to trace the source of these. When it happens the computer shuts down immediately, with no opportunity to intervene. It just briefly displays the shutting down message then powers off.

Since I cannot find the source of the command, I want to eliminate its effect. Is there any service setting or Registry hack or other setting that will make Windows 7 ignore the shutdown command? Or if someone knows the keyboard scan code that does this, perhaps I could remap it to something less destructive. I don't need the ordinary shutdown procedure to work on this computer so if there is a simple way to block it completely, that would provide an adequate solution.

 

It's not that. It only happens when I switch over with the remote.

 

Thanks for the replies. These things are never straightforward with me. I have an old Presario running Win7 that I use only for streaming. I am trying to optimise it for 10-foot operation. The way things are set up, no media centre software I have tried actually does what I want so I have built my own system using a variety of shortcuts and macros. I have a cheap generic IR remote that is identical or similar to the Sanoxy brand. My Harmony One remote can install this as a device using the Chinavasion database. This way I can send any of the remote’s commands using the Harmony.

Many of the Chinavasion commands are transmitted as complex macros and I am not trying to use any of those. Instead, I am only using those commands that transmit as single key presses. There are a half-dozen or so of these. I have assigned them to available Harmony keys. I then use AnyHotKey scripts on the computer to assign functions to the keys. In this way I can use some Harmony keys to control the computer, while others control other devices such as the home theatre system. This worked well at first but when I added some menu commands, I started running into trouble. Since I only have a limited number of keys available, I created an AHK menu which pops up when I press a button on the remote, and this gives me a list of added functions I can scroll through. The problem is that some random commands are now being generated and things are behaving in unexpected ways. When I press the Harmony command to switch the input to the computer, the computer immediately shuts down. I can prevent this by removing one menu, but pinpointing the source of the problem is difficult. So what I would like to do is prevent the shutdown from occurring so I can try to trace the command. That is the reason for my question. The IR remote does have a shutdown key on it that causes exactly the behaviour I am seeing, so I assume that is the key press that is being transmitted for some reason but I can’t test this because the computer shuts down if I try.

The remote receiver is a PnP USB dongle. There are no specific drivers and no power management settings I can find to prevent the shutdown behaviour. There is only an option to put the computer to sleep instead of powering off but no choice to do nothing. The Shutdown Guard looks interesting, but I am going to try remapping the keyboard first as I now have the codes that are supposed to do that.

 

I finally settled on a solution of sorts. In typical Windows fashion, it is a bit of a half-arsed workaround, but in this one specific case, it is good enough.

Shutdown Guard didn’t work. It just made the problem worse. It did block the shutdown, but I ended up with the shutdown screen filling the monitor and no way to cancel it. I finally had to unplug the computer to get it to restart.

Keyboard remapping didn’t work. A registry hack and other things I tried didn’t work. Tools that were supposed to help were not available on my system.

What finally worked was changing the power button setting under advanced options in Control Panel to do nothing. This isn’t ideal, because it also blocks every other way of shutting down or rebooting the computer. The only thing that still works is Ctrl-Alt-Del. This wouldn’t be acceptable for any normal computer use, but it is okay in this case because the computer is only used for streaming and it gets shut down with everything else at night when the main power is switched off.

I’m just glad to have found any solution. Thanks for the inputs, everyone.