WinXP won't shut off

[Grim Reaper]

one thing that ive heard that can fix slow shutdowns on some systems is disabling the NVIDIA Driver Helper service, located in Control Panel -> Admin Tools -> Servers...change this to manual...which im sure u already know how to do :)...hopefully this'll work as this slows down some systems & is not needed.

[aznx]

maybe its your power switch...
turn acpi back on..

[Darthtanion]

I did re-enable the ACPI functions (as stated a few posts earlier) and it did not help. As for it being the power switch, that is highly unlikely since it worked fine when I was running Win98SE.

I have heard that a fresh format of the drive may help out, so if I can get some free time, I may try that.

[Grim Reaper]

did u try my above post? maybe you should try that just to make sure & maybe save yourself from a format...

[Darthtanion]

Yes, I made the suggested registry changes and it still hangs. I also decided to use the registry hack from Microsoft that is supposed to fix this on certain systems, but I guess that I wasn't one of the "Selected" ones. :(

Oh well... I guess I'll just bite the bullet and reformat. Hopefully I will have time to do it this weekend.

[sKuLLsHoT]

the F5 trick: press F5 when you are prompted during install to press F6, remember, have ACPI/APM enabled in bios to start with...so that correct driver support is installed...

anyways a little list should come up and from there u choose "Standard PC"

this disables the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) that MS started using on win2k/xp, it is meant to be an intuitive system that determines correct resource settings for your system devices and then allocate them accordingly, however, this is where majority of people have performance issues, because for some wacked out reason HAL puts everything on the one IRQ just about...

so u can see this is one of the reasons many people had issues with an SB Live and other stuff (ask silencer ;) ) devices fight over the IRQs...

if you choose "Standard PC" it will then allow the bios to control the IRQ settings, it doesn't mean u can change it within windows, but atleast u can go and mess around with things in the bios, and the OS WILL take it!

if you do this i suspect your problem will be gone, either because of an inconsistency in your installation, or becoz of the F5 trick...remember if u do that to enable apm support in the apm tab in control panel>power settings...

mmmk

[Dai the Flu]

Hey Darth,

I've been installing XP on a lot of peoples machines at work lately and I've noticed that it reacts oddly to network cards. Now I am assuming you have one installed so give this a try...

1. remove the NIC drivers
2. remove the nic itself
3. kill all network related functions

see if that does it... it's not a permanent fix but atleast if it solves the problem... you've found the root

l8r