Vista will not shut down

[Mecham]

Hi guys,

I have come across a problem which has never happened before and I am kinda at a loss because I cannot find what caused this to happen, I have been working from home today, and I have had such a busy day and my machine has been on solid for 12 hours now and just had about enough of typing and decided to call it a day and turn off my machine...?

Clicked on Shut down and the sidebar went but the desktop was still there... I waited... and waited... and waited... and nothing so eventually I had to manually shut down and then restart because I wanted to look at the even logs to see what happened and nothing is listed to say the system hung nothing at all. I checked the time stamp for when the system would not shut down and there is nothing. Has this happened to anybody else where it will not shut down.

Thanks.

 

[madmatt]

My Vista test box always shuts down (and a lot faster than XP does) when I tell it to. Has it happened more than once?

It's likely a third party application that hung it up.

 

[Mecham]

My Vista test box always shuts down (and a lot faster than XP does) when I tell it to. Has it happened more than once?

It's likely a third party application that hung it up.

Don't get me wrong the shut down is like "SHUT DOWN" and your done, it is fast at shutting down, but there is nothing in the event logs to state what caused it at the time I had to manually shut down. The manual shut down is time stamped but before this, nothing. It could be my system mind because she's getting on now about 4 years old which is old for a machine these days. I was only running Microsoft Word which I closed and then Start> Shut Down and nothing.

 

[madmatt]

You must be running a security suite of some sort. It was likely a third party application that failed to shut down its services which hung the OS.

 

[Mecham]

I found the source of the problem.

Computer Management takes some getting used to on Vista because there are so many other folders in Event Viewer compared with Windows XP Pro. the only Event ID I could find that tied in with the time stamp when I would not shut down was Event ID 6008, which after looking into it, makes a lot of sense because it could have been caused by the Winlogon not logging off the user correctly. It could have also been caused by a continuous running screen saver, after this is happens the shut down does not initiate.

Now my machine was running all day and the screen saver was on and off, at one point I was had to log back in again which was unusual because I did not have the screen saver password protected, therefore it should have not logged me out. So something happened at this point as well. The only explanation I have is for some reason 6008 caused the logout to fail.

Thanks

 

[lancer]

mecham check out the performance page, it may tell you about a driver hanging the shutdown process.

 

[madmatt]

The only security running on the system is McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.5i which has never caused it to shut down incorrectly before.

Look at the bigger picture... maybe it was in the middle of downloading an update or applying new definitions. Those are just two examples of what would cause it to hang on for longer.

Then again, it may not be your security suite. But something caused the shutdown to hang.

 

[Perris Calderon]

any app that is waiting will keep the os from shutting down, you want that to happen, for instance if you were working on a document and it was never saved to the hardrive that would need to get done before the os would shut down.

if an app is hanging and therefore can't go to disk with new work, that would prevent the os from shutting down.

next time it happens, go to taskmanager and individually shut down the apps to see which one was hanging

 

[kop48]

Also, there was a tweak in XP which allowed you to tell Windows to kill a task that was taking too long to shutdown. Maybe it defaults to simply waiting in Vista? I can't tell you, because I haven't installed it yet.

 

[Perris Calderon]

Also, there was a tweak in XP which allowed you to tell Windows to kill a task that was taking too long to shutdown. Maybe it defaults to simply waiting in Vista? I can't tell you, because I haven't installed it yet.

a person should never perform that tweak, if an app closes before it saves you could loose changes you don't want to loose.

personally I wish the window came up sooner, but simply killing it is a bad idea

you usually need to wait for the window to open that tells you which app is hanging, then save and close

most of the time that app doesn't need to be saved, but it might