xp slow to turn off

when I turn my computer off I press start and click turn off computer then the box with the 3 choices comes up and I turn off, it used to bring up this box immediately, but the past week when I click on turn off computer the box will take up to 5 minutes or more to appear. every thing else seems to be okay, except explorer 8 which takes about 30 seconds to load after clicking on it. I'm running xp, have 3ghz pentium 4 and 2gbs ram and 160 gb harddrive. once explorer loads everything is ok, it loads web sites at a good speed etc. what do you think is wrong?

 

someone suggested I use Chrome or firefox but I'm an old fella and like to use what I'm comfortable with, besides I recently read somewhere that chrome and firefox are more susceptable to viruses etc than explorer

 

Try the User Profile Hive Cleanup, it should help.

It looks like IE8 has a problem, try reinstalling or repairing it.

As to IE being more secure - maybe - under certain circumstances; under others, less so - it's part of the operating system so anything happening inside IE can have a direct effect on Windows. Example: if you have Java installed but Java is completely disabled in IE, a webpage with a particular trigger mechanism can still start Java on your computer - this doesn't happen with non-IE browsers and disabled Java plugins.