Win XP takes 5 minutes to shut down!

[BoeingBoy]

Hi all,

Just lost the plot and after beating the dreaded Medion into submission over the lappy, I went out and bought their latest offering from Aldi. (Win XP home/3Ghz Intel4/1.5Gb RAM (Upgraded)/200GB HD/Medion Radeon 9800XXL with TV card. etc)

All is going well and I am generally pleased with the beast. However in the last 48 hours I have obviously got myself a shutdown conflict in that the machine has gone from 1 minute to shut down to over 5!! It does eventually shut down but takes forever. Disabling all processes produces a smart shut down as does working my way through the current processes in task manager, however I don't have enough years left in life to shut each process down independantly to see if it's the offending one.

Does anyone know of a utility that could isolate the conflict in the shutdown process?

In the last 48 hours I installed a game demo (Far Cry) from a magazine disk and had endless conflicts with the ATI Radeon 9800XXL graphics card, so that was uninstalled. Otherwise Norton and Windows updates along with a new version of Onspeed (Net accelerator) is all I've added to it. I have also done a lot of tweaking of the graphics settings, but FS2002/4 and IL2FB along with Call of Duty are all playing well both on and offline.

(Update 06/05/2004 13:19) Comparing processes in task manager with my laptop and other desktop I find that none of the non windows ones makes any difference when they are shut down. However ending one of the four 'svchost.exe'/system's shown will cause the machine to shut down quickly. I don't know if that is connected to the problem or just another way of getting the beast to shut down without hanging

Any Idea's?

Thanks.

BB