How to solve Windows 98 shutdown problems...

Answer

This question was answered on April 30, 2001. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

The Windows 98 shutdown problem is one that many of you have experienced and there are a variety of causes for it. If you are running Windows 98SE (Second Edition) there is a patch at the Microsoft website that addresses this issue, but in most cases, it is as a result of something that was added or changed since the systems was new.

Components and their “drivers” (the software that controls them) are likely suspects. Try to determine if the problem started happening after you installed a new video card, network card, sound card or any new piece of hardware. If so, visit the component manufacturer’s website to see if an updated driver has been posted for your version of Windows.

Another common cause of the shutdown problem is a piece of software that was added such as an anti-virus program, third party screen savers or anything that resides in memory during the operation of your system. Icons in the “systray” (which is located at the bottom right hand corner of the screen, next to the clock) represent these programs. When you tell Windows to shutdown, it notifies these programs to terminate and then waits for them to close before shutting down Windows. If a program does not shut itself down, Windows can wait “forever” to shutdown. One such program is the Quicken download manager that is automatically added to your startup when you install the current versions of Quicken. To see if any of these programs are causing the problem, right-click on the icon and click exit or close just prior to shutting down Windows. (Test one program at a time.)

To remove suspected programs from your Windows startup, click on Start/Run and type “msconfig”. Click on the “Startup” tab at the top right to show you everything that is loading at startup. Look for a line that contains the name of the program in question and remove the checkmark in front of the line. This will tell Windows not to process this line during startup and the icon will not appear in the systray the next time you start your computer. If you don’t know what something is in the startup, DO NOT remove the checkmark as it may be a vital component for Windows.

Another possibility is that the Exit sound file is corrupted. To check this, click on Start/Settings/Control Panel then double-click on the Sounds icon. Scroll down the list of events and click on the Exit Windows entry. In the Name: box select another sound file or scroll to the top of the list and select “None”. Click on OK and see if the system shuts down properly.

There are several other technical solutions including disabling Advanced Power Management, the Fast Shutdown Option and viewing or modifying the winstart.bat and bootlog.txt files. I have posted links to the specifics at <a href="http://www.datadoctors.com/shutdown" target="_blank"><font color="#003399">www.datadoctors.com/shutdown</font></a> and included a link to the “shutdown supplement” patch from Microsoft for Windows 98SE.

Question

Answer

Author

Free Computer Tips