Windows XP shutdown hangs

Junkguy · Dec 30, 2004, 12:06 AM

Since yesterday, Windows XP hangs at the "Windows is shutting down" screen (happens every time I shut down). I've tried leaving it there, but it was still stuck even after a half hour. I've been doing cold power-downs everytime this happened. (By the way, I've tried virus scanning and system restore)

It shuts down properly when I use safe mode. Following XP's Help and Support guide, and through trial-and-error, I managed to get it to work by narrowing down the culprit to a few startup services. Currently, only a few services are disabled, and I am quite sure that the offending service is one of them.

Right when I thought everything was fixed and the culprit was found, I scheduled a scandisk ("Check Disk"/"Error Checking") and restarted. This time... it hanged again. WTF.

As I'm writing this, I'm testing some other conditions for successful shutdowns. It seems to work when I restart immediately after the computer is fully finished loading (approximately 10 seconds after it reaches the desktop). However, everytime I restart like that, there is an End Process window for vsmon.exe (a component of ZoneAlarm) and it closes after the progress bar reaches 1/3.

I have tried shutting down ZoneAlarm and ending vsmon.exe immediately after startup, and the shutdown still works.

My theory is that if I allow the computer to fully load (like after many minutes), shutdown may hang. I just tested this theory, and it still shutted down successfully...

So what's going on? Ever since it hanged after I scheduled a scandisk, it has worked under every condition I have tried. Probably it was caused by the scandisk? If I have already disabled the offending startup service, why would using scandisk still cause shutdown to hang? Maybe... theres more than one culprit?

Any ideas?