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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?
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Wednesday February 12 2020, @10:07PM (3 children)
...can shut down in a reasonable amount of time. Press the power button, 1 second later everything goes silent.
Windows NT3.5 and NT4 sit there for ages while displaying a message "saving your settings" which is obviously not true as there is no disk activity during this time. XP and 7 do the same thing but without bothering to actually give a lame excuse to cover for the time wastage.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by istartedi on Wednesday February 12 2020, @11:38PM (1 child)
Fond memories of working with a software installer for NT3.5. A very small fraction of our customer base ran it. We discovered that if we re-booted NT immediately after the install, it didn't work. If we re-booted after 15 to 20 seconds, it worked. Plainly it wasn't worth whatever price it would have cost in time and money to get a straight answer from MS regarding this behavior. We went with the easy and obvious fix. We had the installer display a bogus progress bar for 30 seconds just to be safe. IIRC, it said, "configuring settings". It was literally doing nothing but waiting for NT to finish some kind of house-keeping that was somehow interfering with our installer. I'm not proud of it... but I'm really not ashamed either. It's on my list of "favorite hacks" from over the years.
Maybe, just maybe, there was some kind of API that would have let us know (via a callback?) that NT was really ready to be re-booted after we had modified the registry and/or installed some files in the system folder... but I don't think we had the full development package that might have included that kind of information. IIRC, they wanted $5k for that.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @02:12AM
I shared that story with a friend, who said they routinely added arbitrary delays to their installers to prevent the same sort of issues on Windows machines with a high load average or resource contention.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday February 14 2020, @01:27AM
Maybe just finding all your settings is an NP-complete problem?