Shutdowns

[stymied]

Running XP Home SP2. Shutdowns take forever, particularly the 'saving
settings' part; that section alone takes about 4-5 minutes to go through.
Best guess is that it's not actually saving any settings, but gets hung up.
Experimented with Start button items (removed some, pinned others), upon
reboot, none of the previous changes were saved. Also, desktop also always
boots up with active desktop disabled, despite being restored every time.

Want to fix, but don't know how to w/o reinstalling the OS. Any suggestions
would be appreciated.

 

[Malke]

Running XP Home SP2. Shutdowns take forever, particularly the 'saving
settings' part; that section alone takes about 4-5 minutes to go
through. Best guess is that it's not actually saving any settings, but
gets hung up. Experimented with Start button items (removed some,
pinned others), upon
reboot, none of the previous changes were saved. Also, desktop also
always boots up with active desktop disabled, despite being restored
every time.

Want to fix, but don't know how to w/o reinstalling the OS. Any
suggestions would be appreciated.

Here is an excellent shutdown troubleshooter:

http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/shtdwnxp.htm

Also, this problem is commonly caused by malware:

http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#Removing_Malware

Malke