Windows 7: Laptop will not shutdown or restart - clean install no help

Hi - first I apologize for the lengthy explanation!

My problem started after a user complained her laptop was starting up on its own after she shut down. I tried myself and she was right - when selecting shutdown from the start menu the computer *looked* like it had shutdown, but the power button and lights on the front stayed lit. After about 10-15 minutes it started up with a BSOD for DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE STOP: 0x0000009F.

I have had this same BSOD on other employee laptops so i tried uninstalling the driver that i thought was the culprit on those machines. They are all DELL Vostro 3450's, running a clean install of Win 7 enterprise. Didn't help so I went to the Dell support page and tried to download and install the recommended updates for my support number. One of them was the BIOS - I ran the install for that and after restarting the system it would not recognize the network adapter (not even a node for it in device manager).

Was on the phone for 2 hours this morning with dell - managed to get the wireless network working after going into BIOS and setting all to factory default. However - the laptop still would not shutdown! She had me run hardware diagnostics and everything is fine so she said this is a windows issue, and I should try a clean install.

So I ran a clean install from my Windows 7 enterprise software assurance disk (btw couldn't use this disk via recovery - something about bad product key so had to run from disk).
While installing windows I had to manually shutdown and restart the laptop every time it was supposed to restart on its own b/c it just froze and wouldn't restart.

Finally on the fresh install - same problem. Laptop refuses to shutdown and now also won't restart. HOWEVER - before the screen would at least go black. Now it just hangs at the shutting down screen.

I have NOT installed any of the Dell drivers so I don't have network access on the laptop. I am starting in selective startup mode. The only thing that fixes the problem is starting in safe mode - then the computer will shutdown.

At the moment I can't run the SF diagnostic utility b/c without the drivers I have no usb to run the program from.

What would be the first thing I should do - should I install all the drivers to get a dump/log file? Or is there something anyone can recommend I do first?

Thanks - pulling my hair out here!!

Also forgot to mention - before I reinstalled windows I tried to do a system restore that failed.

Post it following the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) Posting Instructions.

Okay - wasn't sure if this was still a BSOD issue b/c main concern right now is freezing on the shutdown screen. So I entered normal startup mode to enable usb drivers. Then I attempted a shutdown, it froze, I had to manually shutdown and restart - I thought doing this would create an error log for the dump (windows was set to create a kernel memory dump)

Ran the SF Diagnostic Tool and got the following error & then it froze:

"unhandled exception has occured in your application" & could not find file 'C:\Windows\EventApp.txt'

Can this thread maybe be moved to a more appropriate thread please?

Thank you!

As per what you have posted in the first post, you got a BSOD, stop 0x9F.
Without verifying that crash's dump, you may not get proper help that is really required there.

You already are in the appropriate thread for BSODs.

To get help, please see: http://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-d...tructions.html

Okay - I reinstalled the oem win 7 home premium to my system partition and formatted my primary partition. Then I reinstalled win 7 enterprise to the primary partition (now it dual boots for some reason, done this 15 times before without that happening??) and reinstalled all the drivers from the dell resource media cd. I was receiving this same error during the OS installation when it restarts itself. Also - the drivers are all extracting to the system partition, even though I'm running the Windows 7 enterprise from the primary partition?

Anyways, I was finally able to create the zip file....