PC hangs when I try to shut it down

[Mr. LL]

Hey, I hope you all can help me out here. I have a few PC's that hang when I try to shut them down.

OS: Win2K, SP3 or 4
Primary apps: Act!, Quickbooks, Excel, MS Word, IE
CPU: 800 mhz
RAM: 512

If I powr the PC off and then try to reboot it then it works fine. It only hangs after the system has been up for several hours and all apps have been opened. I think that a process is causing it to hang but I can't determine exactly what process is hanging the system. I have tried to kill certain processes using a lot of memory and CPU usage but I usually get access denied even though the account is a local admin.

If i try to log it off and then reboot it hangs at log of. What happens it the desk top is there and I can move the mouse around but no clicks or key board keys do anything, can't three finger it either. You have to press the power button.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to determine what is killing it or is there a program that will just kill all of the non system processes?

 

[Osiris]

go to start, programs, startup folder, delete all those entries in there.

 

[brady]

After you delete all the startup entries you may want to scan the machine for any kind of Malware that may be hiding.

 

[Osiris]

Like this:


Follow these instructions carefully

Download ALL 8 programs and update if needed.

Ad Aware SE Personal Free

Spybot Search and Destroy Free

Windows Defender 2 Beta

HijackThis Free

Ewido

CCleaner

Cleanup!

Follow these steps

Delete the prefetch folder C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch, this folder will come back on next reboot.

Delete all cookies and temporary internet files in the control panel.

Go to Start, run, type msconfig, go to startup, disable everything except your antivirus, Firewall, click apply, dont reboot yet.

Download Msconfig Cleanup below

Msconfig Cleanup Free

Run Msconfig Cleanup after you unchecked the items you were told to uncheck and recheck, click "Select All", then click "Clean up Selected", then click "Quit". Make sure your antivirus and firewall are not checked.

Now run each spyware program 1 by 1. Running all 3 at the same time will slow most systems down.

When each program has finished scanning, remove everything.

Now go to the recycle bin and delete everything that is in it.

When finished with the scans, reboot, and go into Safe Mode and run these scans again, remove everything they find, and then reboot back into Windows in normal mode. You dont need to run Hijackthis! yet.

Then run HiJackthis!

Save the log, copy and paste the log on www.techist.com
Do not attach the log, copy and paste always. This will make things go much faster.

 

[Mr. LL]

Thanks. I deleted the start up stuff and ran msconfig to uncheck some things but it still hangs, this was done a while ago. I also run Ad-Aware and Norton's AV every week. I'll try some of the other things mentioned and see how that goes.