Win XP Shutdown
 

OK- next problem. I think that since I installed W7 as a dual boot on XP SP3 system shut-down has gone for ball of chalk. Over 3 minutes now with constant drive activity. Can someone explain (in simple terms) what XP does on shutdown eg registry write, swap file etc and what I can do to go back to a normal shut-down. 'Saving settings' often lingers and the main hang is on 'Shutting down'. W7 shut-down is 'normal'.

Try enabling verbose status messages, see here.

Try safe mode. Does it behave better during shutdown ?

Try manually stopping third party services ? Recalcitrant services often cause slow shutdowns.

Check your disk health.

Try temporarily disabling your realtime antivirus protection and see if it makes a difference to the shutdown time.

I have a desktop icon linking to shutdown.exe which I use every time.

Give that a try, keeping the icon well clear of others to avoid accidental activation!

Thanks all for the ideas - mix - I'll keep that 'up ma sleeve'.

In fact, on a whim I looked to see if the 'clearswapfileonshutdown' reg setting I changed eons ago was still 0 - it wasn't - some barsteward must have crept in and changed it to 1. Restoring it to 0 now has the shutdown in 20 secs.

Yeah, that would slow things down a tad.

An update for you - despite still having the same reg setting, my XP machine reverted to the march of death on shutdown and nothing could I do UNTIL I discovered (call me slow) UPHClean-Setup.msi by M$ which handles processes that do not shut-down cleanly. I guess some driver update had snafu'd my machine. I believe it is only valid up to XP, although there are hints of Vista and thus presumably 7? Back to a lovely shut down and now no time to take the dogs out into the garden while I wait.:)

'some barsteward must have crept in and changed it to 1'

I have one of those too-also drinks all the wine.