Freezing at "windows is shutting down screen"

[Jim]

This happens to me once in a great while. Just now I had terminated
a program (Norton's One Button Check Up) but after several minutes of
constant disk activity and very very sluggish windows response, I
decided to do a restart. Before doing so I checked the task manager
which indicated the system idle process consuming 90-97 percent of CPU
although total CPU usage never showed as more than 20%.

Even after the "shutting down screen" appeared there were 2 or 3 more
minutes of constant disk activity, but then 5 minutes more had passed
with no disk activity so I powered it off and back on.

Two Questions:
1) Alternative solutions once the shutdown screen has been reached
and disk access stops.
2) How to avoid this occurring.

TIA

 

[Heirloom]

"System Idle Process" is not 'consuming' cpu cycles...........this is the %
of cpu available for processing.
What processes are shown to be running??
Heirloom, old and waiting for my new drives

 

[Jim]

I've there's usually 47 or so processes running. I've gone to his web
site:
http://www.answersthatwork.com/

and looked through the task list. Most were identified as essential
to windows, or to Norton System Works (around a dozen). There were no
viruses or worms identified, plus I run Norton AV/Zone Alarm &
periodically AdAware/Spybot.

I have always 6 instances of svchost.exe running, 2 NETWORK SERVICE, 3
SYSTEM and 1 LOCAL SERVICE. I have eliminated a handful, or less, or
processes that appeared safe to stop.

That said, and in reference to your response below, it does not seem
that the system was excessively busy processing, but was very busy
read/writing when I initiated the shutdown.