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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday February 12 2020, @04:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the Have-you-tried-turning-it-off-and-restarting... dept.

Windows 7 will not go gentle into that good night: Ageing OS refuses to shut down:

It's not only end of support that Windows 7 diehards have to contend with. Late last week a new problem emerged – systems that refuse to shut down.

Complaints have been widespread on Reddit, Microsoft's official Answers forum and on on SevenForums. Some users also reported other issues, such as not being able to view their documents folder in Explorer.

Fortunately the problem seems to be fixable in most cases. The favourite solution is to tweak the UAC (User Account Control) settings with the Group Policy setting "Run all administrators in Admin Approval Mode" or the equivalent registry setting. Then run gpupdate/force, and everything goes back to normal.

There are other workarounds, such as using shutdown from the command prompt, or logging off and then shutting down.

This does not explain the reason for the problem, which appeared mysteriously on or around 7 February. There may be a clue in two other popular fixes.

Have any Soylentils run into this problem? How did you get around it?


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @08:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @08:39PM (#957373)

    Windows 7 shut down successfully, but it wouldn't allow cancelling out of the shutdown to deal with an open and unsaved notepad instance. I finally had to choose force shutdown and it completed successfully. Looks like another Windows upgrade timebomb just like Windows XP got at its end of support. Wish the Anti-Trust guys would scrutinize them again, because this is definitely shady behavior.

    Having said that, for anyone who doesn't need specific Windows 7 updates, try reverting to an SP1 install and just keep it firewalled/airgapped and you should be fine. I still have a box for the rare Windows-only games, so security isn't an issue. But really, if you are running Windows to begin with, are you really that concerned with being secure?

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