Debugging Windows shutdown

[bgowland]

My wife's PC (XP Home Edition) has suddenly taken to 'sticking' at the 'Windows is shutting down' screen.

Are there any tools anyone can recommend to trace what's going on during the shutdown process? It doesn't seem like it's just being slow as I let it sit there for an hour last night before eventually hitting the soft power button to kill it.

Cheers,
Brian

[martint123]

Not easy with XP (or any to be honest). Driver or service most likely. If it does it most of the time, then killing off any background tasks before shutdown may help pin it down.
Likewise stopping services. ISTR my nvidea driver was the cause on my old machine (or the board itself).
Much patience required.

edit: - anything in eventviewer?

[bgowland]

Yep, not as easy as monitoring startup - I seem to remember Filemon and Regmon had an option for loading at boot time and you could see everything loading up. Anything attempting to monitor shutdown is inevitably going to be killed or would stall the shutdown itself.

Nothing immediately obvious in the event logs.

It's weird, if I start it up and leave it 5 minutes to settle (don't start any apps) it'll shutdown cleanly.

It seems to be related to some application my wife uses (normally only Office and Chrome) but I can't reproduce it - just starting Word or Outlook or Chrome then shutdown still goes cleanly. Perhaps some library is loaded as part of what she does and then refuses to unload. Not sure.

[bgowland]

Oo, ah. Just remembered she was doing some printing tonight. I wonder if it's related to the printer drivers or the software which monitors ink levels and the like. Hmmm.