Puter won't shut down..

[brockenspectre]

I have recently updated McAfee VirusScan and added another Guardian feature from their website AND have installed an anti pop-up window program plus a program to manage memory (MemoKit). Since I did this when I select Start-Shut Down the puter terminates all programs but then hangs at the Win98 screen and, of course, I can't do anything at this point except turn the machine off. When I turn it on again it goes through the "Windows was not properly shut down" routine.

Can someone help me please?

:D

[MasterGreen]

Hi,
Simple answer to a complex question. "Dump the memory Manager".

Regardless of what we think about the "Coders from Redmond" the Memory Management and Stack Handling in WIN95 and onwards is pretty complex. Some (or most - maybe all) of these so called memory managers are very suspect. You can do apparent wonders with a stack flush and simple "alligator reclaim" on the 8086xxxx instruction set, but unless you have addressed all the special needs of some 30+ processes running in a WIN95 and up system, you are doomed to cause problems. Memory management in WIN is best left to Windows at the end of the day. Realistically you cannot beat it. That some programs bleed off memory and waste resources is one of those things. Even Redmond write those. Life is a bitch.

But back to your problem. Your memory manager may well be dumping core memory and recovering some of it, however it leaves processes hanging out to dry. When you go to shut down - they (the drying processes) cannot find the structures they need to terminate - hence they hang. And worse still, they don't even have the basics to tell the system that they are really still there. It is the computer equivalent of being buried alive...

A better alternative to memory (mis)management is to identify the problem programs and avoid them. In this list comes most "cheap and nasty" games and older software that was never designed for the WIN95++ memory system. DOS "box" games using EMS are particularly suspect in this regard.

WIN2000 onwards avoids these problems by the simple method of just refusing to run them. XP doubly so.

MG

[brockenspectre]

Thank you for the replies - tonight I will end the mem manager prog before attempting the shut down and see what happens...not sure I have much running in the background..

:)

P.S. I have found that my puter is working much faster generally with the mem manager running...so am loth to dump it altogether!

[brockenspectre]

Thanks again for the advice. I shut down the memory manager before I closed the puter down last night and all worked perfectly!

:D