"Windows is shutting down...." takes 5 sec-35 min

[Guest]

I've got the PC from Hell. After removing a ton of spyware, the machine
acted flaky (Office didn't load, software didn't install, Norton AV said it
needed a reinstall which I did) so I did a repair reinstall and then applied
SP2 (which failed the first time and had to be backed out). Now the machine
is less flaky, but when you shut down it takes from 5 seconds to 35 minutes.
It will eventually complete shutting down if you have that much patience.
I've read hundreds of these posts but have found nothing that has worked. I
tried altering the process kill value in the registry as suggested in one
post and made it 1000 instead of 20000 but that doesn't work reliably either.
I'd like to avoid a destructive reload and reinstalling everything.

Any idea what's happening while it's just sitting there. It seems to be
waiting for something, but how can you figure out what since task manager is
closed and everything is poised for it to turn off, but instead it just sits.

Thanks!

 

[Marvin7]

Try uninstalling Norton's, I have seen dozens of machines which have issues
with Norton's, just stop it from running at first to see if that's the
problem.
HTH

 

[Guest]

I uninstalled Norton and it still seems to take 10 minutes or more to shut
down even before you log in. That is, if you reboot and get to the login
screen and click "turn off computer" it took 2 minutes to come up with the
"turn off/restart" window and then 10 more minutes to complete power down.