Slow shutdown issues
 

This is kind of weird, and it still happens despite all I've done to correct it.

The problem is sometimes, especially when on battery power but also when plugged in as well, my Asus eee PC 900HD will not shut down immediately. It will wait, as if I never told it to shut down, for 2-5 minutes before actually shutting down as if nothing was wrong.

I brought this up on the eeeuser forums, and they gave me many things to try, but nothing has completely eliminated the problem.

Any ideas?

Weird. Apparently one thing that makes a shutdown go too long is when Windows XP tends to install updates (from Automatic Updates) before shutting down. Or that there are some applications that are taking too long to close.

I've had that happen to me before on XP, but I never managed to figure out why. I gave up and reimaged back to when I installed the OS, and that was that. My biggest suspect was the antivirus service refusing to die (perhaps it somehow thought the shutdown as hostile action), but there are probably other services.

I'm going to say that it will take a lot of work for you to pinpoint the service(s) that are refusing to kill themselves. Try to keep a task manager running, kill a few processes that you think might be the problem (start with killing everything you can see), and try shutting down.

You might have to manually disable the antivirus and firewall apps under "services.msc". Try restarting Windows with them off and see if it shuts down nicely.

Of course, there's always the nuclear reinstall option. It's very rare that I had to surrender and resort into using that, but this made me do it.

I had this problem too for a short while D: registry booster managed to fix it for me after a scan and fix

Windows has a number of security features turned on (in the registry) that do things like flush the swap file and other cleanup features when you tell the computer to shut down. This can impact the amount of time it takes to shut down the computer.

Alternativly, if you have a billion programs open, windows has to close them all before it begins closing down the OS part, and if any of those programs don't immediately respond to the shutdown command and hang for a few seconds, that adds up.

If OP's problem resembles mine, your first paragraph isn't what's happening (didn't know Windows does this though). The hard drive was not doing anything significant (light not on, etc.). In fact, it would seem that nothing was doing anything significant, because task manager didn't show any busy processes. It would be something like 98% idle, just waiting for stuff to happen.

Eventually, XP whined about my antivirus being open for half a second before it voluntarily closed itself, which hinted to me that that wasn't what caused the problem, and caused me to give up.

I think the default for windows to wait for an application to close before attempting to terminate it is 15 seconds, though you can change it in the registry.

I guess one other thing I can think of is that Windows doesn't handle well if you've had a had a large memory eating program open. You might notice this after closing a game that eats a ton of RAM and stuff and try to open a video file and it takes 20-30 seconds before it loads up.

Could also be some sort of memory leak, so it's trying to clean up the allocated memory before it closes. Next time look at your tasks/process and utilization to see if anything stands out.