About 3 months ago my PC began taking a long time to shutdown. Before it happened my PC would shutdown virtually straight away. The odd thing is that if I shutdown within 15 minutes of turning on the PC it does shutdown straight away. After 15 minutes it takes about 4 minutes to shutdown. What happens is that I click on Shutdown (Start, Shutdown) then it takes 2 minutes for the dialog box to come up I then press the return key to activate shutdown and then after another 2 minutes it shuts down. My PC is a Mesh PC with the following spec: Athlon 64 3200+, 1 GB Ram, 200 GB hard disk, Nvidia 256 MB DDR FX-5700 LE. The operating system I am using is Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 and Norton AntiVirus. At the time this problem occurred I hadn't installed any new software, so I don't think that is an issue. I used System Restore to return my computer to an earlier state, when shutdown had been working properly but this did not help. Can anyone help me?
I think it’s probably a program running in the background causing the problem. Get the task manager up and close each running programs (or running process one by one) and then shut down, this should help to track down which program or process is causing the slow shut down. Also try this, type in gpedit.msc in start > run menu then go to Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options > Shutdown - Clear virtual memory pagefile make sure its disabled.
Norton is very resource-hungry, but I doubt it has much impact on the situation, i agree with sniper on this resolution
