How do you get rid of a time delay while Windows XP shuts down?

[BrooklynBay]

2 of my computers developed a problem shutting down on Windows XP after installing SP2. The time delay on both of them is about 2 minutes. The computer freezes when you click the turn off computer red icon on the lower left corner of the screen. How do you get rid of this time delay? Did Microsoft make a patch for this issue?

 

[Rick]

MS is on to SP 3 now. I'm not sure if that's what you meant. I have one 'puter that does just as you describe, and another that shuts down quickly

 

[jad2411]

Is this what you meant?:
1. Go to Start > Run when the Run box opens type in regedit

2. Your registry should have opened [Just checking...have you backed up your registry?] Navigate to the following keys; HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > System > CurrentControlSet > Control

3. When you get to Control click on it, the pane to the right should have a listing of several keys, double-click on;

>WaitToKillServiceTimeout, change it to '1000' (changing this forces your computer during shutdown to end services that are running much faster)

4. Once you 've changed these settings restart your computer and your settings should have taken effect.

 

[BrooklynBay]

I'm using SP2 not SP3 since I've read that it creates problems. I'm going to try the above mentioned advice on one machine. I will do it to the second if it works OK.

 

[BrooklynBay]

Thanks for the information! Windows had the setting on 20,000. It's now on 1,000 as you recommended. I started getting many different types of errors on one machine when it would start up after installing SP2, but it seems like this fix helped with that too. How did you find this information?

 

[jad2411]

Got it from instructables, you might find several tips below:

http://www.instructables.com/id/SSZ1E37FB7FYD8D/

 

[BrooklynBay]

I don't know why it still happens occasionally on both machines. Is there another thing to do? I saw in the above link that there is a second part to the instructions for changing the time out for other users, but nobody else uses these machines except for me.

 

[jad2411]

My primary HDD has only the OS + software installed so I don't really care if I mess it up, so I saw that tutorial and followed it (everything worked as stated) then followed on to looking for more tweaks (same webpage) and followed the ones that I saw fit, again everything worked as stated, and my PC now shuts down faster, I got it to boot like 1 sec faster, still have more tweaking to do for it to boot faster, so not sure which are the "good" ones or if it's a matter of all of them combined...

 

[JTX]

Try defragmenting the drive, it may be getting lost while trying to shut down everything.

 

[BrooklynBay]

I usually clean up my files, and defrag pretty often. I see that on the machine with the start up errors that I still do get the errors, but only after I reboot after getting the time delay. I suspect that some program might have something to do with this problem, and I think it might be related to the AOL software. The other machine has the same software but does not have these problems. One thing that occurs a lot is that my task bar turns tan when it starts when it should be blue. I could sometimes correct it by going to the display options in properties, and change it, but it doesn't always work. That's when I have to reboot. Maybe it's a driver error with the graphics card? Sometimes the display on start up will only show the background wallpaper without my program icons.

 

[JTX]

Try msconfig under run. GO into startup and turn everything off on start up. Thats how i run mine, maybe leave just the Anti-virus on.

 

[BrooklynBay]

Some stuff in MSconfig keeps coming back even though I keep taking the checks away. It starts to show multiple items without checks next to them.

 

[JTX]

Did you try a couple times? See which programs keep showing up again and check there settings. Some programs reset everytime you open them.

 

[BrooklynBay]

AOL is one of them. I had a really strange start up problem after running MSconfig. A box came up, and said that I didn't have sufficient rights to open Windows, and had to shut it down. Another box came up after this that told me to log on with a name, and password. It said administrator where the name was, and it wouldn't let me start Windows without typing in the correct password. I have no password, and this was the first time a message like this ever came up. I shut it down again, and it started without any errors the third time.

 

[JTX]

Thats weird, sounds like you may have some spyware/virus problems.

 

[BrooklynBay]

I also get errors when it starts up saying that Windows had to restore one or more files from a back up.

 

[Howard]

I also get errors when it starts up saying that Windows had to restore one or more files from a back up.

Sounds like possible disk trouble. I would run a full disk error check. Open my computer right click on C drive and choose properties. Then the tab called tools. Click the button marked error checking and say check now. Tick both boxes and say ok. You will then get a message that says something like 'can't do it now do you want to schedule for next time' say yes and then re-boot the computer. You should get a blue screen as it does a 5 stage check of the entire disk and fixes any issues that it finds. When it has finished (it may take hours) the computer will re-boot and windows should load normally.

 

[BrooklynBay]

Thanks for the tips. I've already tried the Chkdsk utility. It's strange that I started to get all of these problems on this hard drive right after a clean installation of XP. The hard drive originally belonged to a friend of mine, and gave it to me when he upgraded to a larger drive. It's a Maxtor 80GB IDE drive.

 

[Howard]

I don't like maxtors I've had too many fail on me.

 

[BrooklynBay]

Chkdsk is designed to work on an NTFS system. Scandisk is only for Fat32. Is there another utility that could be used to correct disk errors or possibly registry errors? I've used different ones in the past but it's hard to tell what's really good.