Shutdown Blues (actually blacks)

[JimL]

I've contacted trillions of people (give or take) about a new problem on my T42 without success. Altho this forum is more oriented to hardware I don't know where else to look for help.

Running XP Pro SP3, when I shut down I always get down to an almost black screen with a mouse cursor in the middle of it. This holds for several seconds then I get a dead black screen, no cursor and time to hit the sack.

But for days now that several seconds of almost black screen has turned into a full 5 minutes (eternity when doing a Restart). Previously I've had a bit of this when my external USB hard drive wasn't shut down properly, but I got a handle on that (by being violently anti-autostart) and this is happening whether I have even turned the external on or not.

I've followed suggestions from the windows basic newsgroup for days with no change. This even included adding a service (uphclean) that supposedly improves shutdown handling.

Best I recall there was no new software added when this started. If anyone has a clue what is causing it I'd very much like to hear it.

Thanks

JimL

[RealBlackStuff]

Just wondering if you are running out of space on that hard disk.
On a 40GB HD you'd want about 5GB free space.
Any less, and several Windows actions are getting problems.

[JimL]

>Just wondering if you are running out of space on that hard disk.
>On a 40GB HD you'd want about 5GB free space.
>Any less, and several Windows actions are getting problems.

Hm. Possibility?

I have 9.1 gb free (massive external drive helps). But given 1 gb memory might your 5 gb figure be conservative?

I'll watch my drive access light. Maybe I can detect something.

Thanks

JimL

[madkat]

i dont think it's hdd related...
i've worked for a long time even with under 3gb free space (both on system and/or data partitions) with XP SP2 without any glitches

could 1gb of memory be too little for SP3?
press CTRL+ALT+DEL - and see how many processes are running in normal operation - maybe there are too many or too memory-hungry

[JimL]

>i dont think it's hdd related...

I don't know. When XP shuts down and the delay starts the hard drive access light goes full blast for the whole 5 minutes.

JimL

[virge]

Check your Event Viewer and see if there are any errors under the Application or System logs. That's how I figured out what was holding up my system when I was installing XP on a SDHC card.

To get to Event Viewer: Right click My Computer-->Manage-->Event Viewer