Wndows XP never finishes shutting down

Everything works fine, but after I click "shut down" or "restart", everything looks like it is working normally until it gets down to a blue screen. The mouse still works at that point, but the computer never makes it over that last hurdle.

I admit it happened in the past, and somehow I managed to fix it thru no fault of my own. I believe it happened when I uninstalled IE8. I also believe it is what made it happen in the past. I know this is confusing, so let me start at the beginning.

The first time my computer started doing this was when IE8 first came out in beta. I tried it, Firefox and Chrome, and I determined that Firefox suited my needs best. I uninstalled Chrome and IE8 at that time. I believe that was when my computer started to fail at shutting down the first time. Well, about a month or two later, for some unexplained reason, everything went back to normal and shutdowns and restarts began working.

P.S. I am not sure that IE8 is the culprit, it is just an assumption based on when things went wrong. I am willing to try whatever is recommended.
Two nights ago I decided to test IE8 again, thinking maybe they had all the bugs out of it. Well, they don't, so I uninstalled it again (I had not yet made the connection to the uninstallation of IE8 causing the first series of hangs). Now I am back to hanging on shutting down/restarting again. Yay.

I am running XP with SP3. I have not added any hardware in the last year or so. I use CCleaner, Spybot, AVGfree and a Zonealarm firewall frequently, so I am fairly sure that I do not have any malware. I have googled for fixes, but none work or address my precise problem.

I appreciate any insite anyone may have into this issue. Thanks

 

can you post the BSOD error message?

 

Hi, Merbeast...

I've seen this happen on a few networked machines, when shares are not complete...not saying this is your case, but how is this machine connecting to the 'net? You might try disabling any ethernet or modem connections before shutting down as a troubleshooting procedure...

Shutdown failures can also be caused by 3rd-party programs not completing tasks, etc. - you might try reproducing the symptoms by restarting a few times in Safe Mode...