Windows Vista Shutdown takes forever

I noticed the other night after I had uninstalled M/S Office 2007 from my notebook (as it was a trialware which came with the notebook) that later when I shutdown the notebook it must have taken 10 minutes to shut down and during that time the disk activity led was continuously flashing.
I am thinking that the delay was possibly caused by Windows writing data for possible 'restore' at a later time but could someone please explain what could have caused the long shutdown time and if shutdown be speeded up without causing possible problems.

 

I am not sure if you had just one shutdown that was slow or if they have been slow or just a little slow since then.

It can happen once in a while that Windows needs to do a lot of work at the time of shutdown. You usually see things like "Saving your settings ", "Closing network connections ", etc, but there will be other things happening if you, say, run an uninstall.

Stretching my imagination, could there be a program installed that "worked with" Office? If that program is still installed it might not know what to do at shutdown when Office is no longer there. Try looking through the list of programs listed in Programs and Features.

Let us know if it only happened once or is slow to shut down constantly now (as I said, it could right itself after a few restarts).

Matt

 

Thanks Matt
Shutdowns usually only take a few seconds including shutdowns since the one mentioned which took about 10 minutes to complete.
Not sure if I had any other programs which were 'dependent' on Office 2007 as I only recently purchased the notebook and I am in the process of installing applications. I had uninstalled Office maybe 30 minutes prior to shutting down the notebook.
Regarding system checkpoints and restore. I cannot find where it is possible to allocate how Disk Usage Space available for system restore as you can with XP. Is it possible to set this space and if so where?