Windows XP shutdown problem

When I go to shutdown the computer, it either takes about 10 minutes, or doesn't shut down at all; sometimes I have to re-set then select turn off computer, then it shuts down allmost immediately.

How long have you had the system? Does it give you any reason in the task manager, like something isn't responding? Was XP an update or did the system come with it?

It sounds like you have a program that is hanging the system up which is making it take forever to shut down. There are two ways to fix this. The first is to figure out what program might be hanging up the system and removing it. The other alternative is to make so windows doesn't wait the default 20 seconds before shutting down any hanging programs. You can change this to 1 second by going here

Services Shutdown Time

Windows XP has the service shutdown time set to 20000 ms which equals 20 sec. To change this go to Regedit and change this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/WaitToKillServiceTimeout

Change it to 1000 which would equal 1 second. This should force windows to shutdown faster as it will prevent programs from hanging up windows.

glad i read this was going to post the same the same thing and your fix bigwebmaster worked well thank you

mine was doing the same thing, works fine now. You guys are awesome

Thanks for the tip but is it safe to kill all windows services quick like that? Could there not be any long term side effects?