Black Screen on Shutdown or Restart

I am running XP Professional on my desktop machine and every time I shutdown, I do not get the "Windows is Saving Your Settings" screen. Instead I get a black screen with a mouse cursor that can be moved around the screen. After 10 minutes or so at this screen my system will eventually shut off. Needless to say, this improper shutdown keeps me from doing new installs or updating the system because settings are not getting saved. For some reason this has suddenly begun happening on my on my laptop, but it is not networked to my desktop in any way except through a shared wireless internet connection.

I have run every utility I can think of to correct the problem including System Restore without much success. The only thing that has changed in my environment recently is the addition of an HP Photosmart 8250 printer. It is the sudden appearance of the same problem on my wireless laptop that has me thinking that this may be a Windows update issue that I am not aware of.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Thanks.

 

Welcome to Majorgeeks!

I am not aware of any Windows Update that causes the issue. However your problems don't seem to be malware related so I suggest you post in the software forum.

If you believe your problems ARE malware related you will need to run through the below steps and post the logs for us to view.

Please follow our standard cleaning procedures which are necessary for us to provide you support. Also there are steps included for installing, running, and posting HijackThis logs as attachments.

• Run ALL the steps in this Sticky thread READ & RUN ME FIRST Before Asking for Support
• Make sure you check version numbers and get all updates.
• Very Important: Make sure you tell us the results from running the tutorial...was anything found? Were you unable to complete any of the scans?...Were you unable to download any of the tools?...Did you do the on-line scans as suggested? etc.

• After doing ALL of the above you still have a problem make sure you have booted to normal mode and run the steps in the below link to properly use HijackThis and attach a log:

Downloading, Installing, and Running HijackThis

Make sure you also rename HijackThis.exe as suggested in the procedures. Use analyse.exe for the new name. This is very important due to some new infections going around.


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• When you return to make your next post, make sure you attach the following logs and that you have run these scans in the following order too:
  • CounterSpy - ONLY IF you were not able to run Windows Defender
  • Bitdefender - from step 6
  • Panda Scan - from step 6
  • runkeys.txt - the log from GetRunKey.bat
  • newfiles.txt - the log from ShowNew.bat
  • HijackThis

NOTE: You can only attach 3 files in a single message so it will require that you use two messages to attach all of these logs!