timeout before shutdown

Hello! Newby here. I retired from Hewlett-Packard as a hardware tech. a couple of years ago. That means I’m pretty good with Windows but know ware near what most of you are. My proficiency level is not high enough to consider myself a geek. This site has gobs of great stuff that I can use now and in the future. So I’m glade to be aboard.

Now, I do have a little problem that someone might be able to give me direction on.

I am running XP and just recently updated to SP3 and this may or may not have a bearing on my problem but I think not. I’m just peed off because it downloaded on me when I really didn’t want it to. But that’s another story. Back to the issue. After working on my computer for a short time when I want to shut it down or hibernate and click on start, then shutdown, it takes 2 minutes before my window comes up to enable me to choose if I want to shutdown or hibernate etc. This seems to me to be something timing out before it lets the window appear. During this time my mouse moves around the screen but I am not able to do anything until the 2 minutes are up and I ether choose to shutdown or cancel.

More info:

If I completely shutdown my computer and after restarting immediately click start then shutdown, I don’t have the problem. I have tried to continually go to start then shutdown after every process that I start to see if I can find out if it is any specific program or whatever. No luck because it isn’t consistent. It is consistent in that it malfunctions after I have run several processes or programs but it doesn’t seem to care what I run.

So bottom line; how can I figure out what it is trying to run that won’t run and waits until it times out? Or, are my assumptions completely wrong and there is something else going on? Obviously this is not a critical thing but I’ll go insane if I don’t rid myself of this tick.

Thanks

John

 

Can you give stats on the computer? I know windows xp is your OS....

 

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
"ForegroundLockTimeout"=dword:00000000
"HungAppTimeout"="4000"
"MenuShowDelay"="200"
"WaitToKillAppTimeout"="5000"
These registry tweaks might help, backup your registry with a program like ERUNT before you make any changes, unless you are comfortable making changes to the registry, and or make note of changes so you can manually change them back if so desired.
http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/xptweaks/supertweaks7.htm
Thanks Eric,
Bug

 

Thanks for responding. I finally had to go back to an older cloned drive. I had gotten out of the habit of cloning very often because I haven’t been screwing around with the operating sys lately. So I lost some data but since I’m retired, how much data could I have? I’ll need to clone more often now that I have found this site because there are a lot of programs that I can use to screw up my operation sys. It’s a psychological thing; I can’t stand for Bill Gates to reach into my home and tell me what I can and can’t do.:major Thanks again

John

 

Just another thought, there is also a setting in the registry that deletes the page file on shut down, I did this yesterday because of an Avast AntiVirus scan of a Windows XP Operating System using a Linux OS. The Scan showed pagefile.sys had a dialer in it, may have been a false positive, I will never know. But deleting/clearing the pagefile sure did delay shutdown time.

H_KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CURRENTCONTROLSET\CONTROL\SESSIONMANAGER\MEMORYMANAGEMENT.

Set the key ClearPageFileAtShutdown to 1 to enable.