Hi Gary,
That problem does pop up quite a bit over time, and as Mark suggested, Norton Anti-virus is often the culprit. The program scans the floppy drive on shut-down and can lock up the system. If you don't have Norton installed though, you can forget about that one.
Question: Does it lock up on the "..Please wait while Windows shuts down..." message or does it go to a black/blank screen?
If it's the latter, it could be the the actual image that displays "..You can now shut down your computer.." has been deleted and you don't have to worry about a thing.
However, if it's locking up at one of the final screens, you might have a program or driver that is locking Windows before it can finally shut-down. Can be tough to isolate the problem. Try this though:
Before you shut the system down, press <ctrl>+<alt>+<del> to bring up the Task Manager. End all all programs except Explorer and Systray. When they are the only ones left, try to shut-down your system as before. If the same thing happens, I wouldn't worry about it too much. If the Safe to Shutdown screen comes back, there's probably a problem with one of the applications you have installed.
Richard |
