restart windows is slow

hi all,

yea, i'm helping someone with her com. the com's very slow (like up to 15 minutes) just to restart windows.

shut down is ok on the other hand.

 

Not much to go on, but suggest you fet an online virus scan and check with Spybot and Adaware - see Links below.

Also clean the various temporory folders, esp. Windows\Temporary Internet... .

 

My bet would be that it is a driver hanging.

Normally , you click shutdown, and windows tells all programs which are still running to save their data, close , and report back when done. If one fails to do so , you get the infamous "program not responding" which allows you to kill it.
Then it tells all devices to save their drivers and either shut down or load dos/ bios drivers and report back. If one of these fails to respond you just get a hang at "windows is shutting down "
Finally , windows turns things over to msdos.sys which saves windows and closes things , turns stuff over to the mother board which turns off power (If it fails at this stage you get the "It is now safe to turn off your PC" screen)

On a restart, you get the program close phase, but the devices are just told to store their drivers and restart.
My bet is one of them, probably the video or sound card is hanging , confused as to why it is not loading a bios/dos driver; or it loads one and is then waiting for windows to tell it to load its normal driver .

Anyway, here is what I want you to do.
Boot to safe mode (tap F8 once a second after you hear the power on POST beep when you press the power button until you get the start menu and choose 3 safe mode). In safe mode, all devices are either disabled or load only DOS/BIOS drivers. Once in safe mode, hit restart and see if it works normally.
This will let you know if it is a problem loading drivers after a reboot .
Next, once you are booted to normal mode reboot and do the F8 thing to boot to safe mode.
If it hangs here , you know it is a problem unloading a driver.

If it is the first case, you most likely need to rebuild the driver database by booting to safe mode, go to control panel / device manager and remove each and every entry , starting at the bottom and then reboot and let windows detect hardware and load drivers.
(Make sure to make a list of all hardware and download any drivers you think you may need first ).

If it is the second, you need to update a driver; most likely the video card or sound card.