Software that can diagnose shutdown problems

[Paul McDonald]

Hello,

I am looking for some software that can investigate and diagnose the cause of shutdown problems in Windows (XP).

I guess it would be something that reads and puts information from the event log into a more easily understood format or perhaps looks at the problem from other sources.

In one case, my XP computer will just say it is shutting down but then not shut down even by 5 hours later.

Nothing is new as far as I can tell and both Avira and Superantispyware report no problems. I also use a sandbox.

Does this sort of program exist?

Cheers,

Paul

[MidnightCowboy]

There are a huge amount of possibilities for this, some are offered here:

http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/shtdwnxp.php

Also, try booting into safe mode and then shutting down. If all goes well this might point to an installed third party program as the cause.

[Paul McDonald]

Thanks Midnight Cowboy,

I already read that article which is well written but largely involves manually going through every possibility.

I thought I read in a computer magazine about a year ago that there was a freeware program that can take a lot of the hard work out of the process by telling you if the problem was driver, hardware or software related etc but I can't remember the name of it.

PS, for startup time issues I use the free Soluto program. This told me that my antivirus program added 1 minute 36 seconds to my boot time. I switched to the MSE that you guys recommend and halved my boot time.

Cheers,

Paul

[torres-no-tan-magnifico]

If you can remember roughly when the the shut down problems first started then you could try an earlier system restore point.

You could also try uninstalling Soluto to see if this may be causing the problem; I seem to remember that having Soluto installed caused me more problems and not too many solutions!