Windows 7: Long shutdown times Win7 64-bit enterprise

Like some other posts I have read, my new windows install has suddenly started to take several minutes to shutdown. I only had a few programs installed when this started. I un-installed each program and did a registry clean to see if any of them was causing the issue, but nothing helped. All that are now installed are the motherboard drivers and such.

This is a list of what is still installed:
Etron USB3.0 Controler
Intel Control Center
Intel HD Graphics Driver
Intel Management Engine
Intel Rapid Storage
Realtek Ethernet
Realtek Audio Driver

I have gone through some things to try to determine what is causing the issue, but have had no success. I checked the shutdown performance logs, and there were allot of warnings. These just seemed to give the shutdown time, but no indication of what was causing the delay. This issue did not exist when I first installed. The computer has no internet connection at the moment, so I have not done windows update or anything like that. There is no possibility of their being a virus for the same reason.

Before uninstalling the apps, I tried msconfig with selective startup (all boxes unchecked), and diagnostic startup and neither reduces the shutdown time.

I am doing allot of setup and the long shutdown time is very annoying because of the number of restarts. Any suggestions regarding how to isolate the issue would be appreciated.

Please let me know if I need to post additional information.

LMHmedchem

I guess there is no one much here to post a reply.

I ended up re-installing and got back to where I had the same list of drivers and GA utilities installed. There is no shutdown delay now, so the delay must have been caused by some configuration I made to windows, or something left over from one of the apps that I installed and then uninstalled.

This install, I have made minimal changes to the OS, basically folder view options. When I make additional changes, I will note if there is a change in the shutdown time and post back if I notice something.

It was suggested in another forum that I may have had the OS set to clear the pagefile at shutdown. This is stored in a registry value at,

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
with ClearPageFileAtShutdown = 1

I re-installed before I got the hint to check this, so I don't know if that was the issue or not. If anyone is having a similar problem, that would be one thing to check.

LMHmedchem

I just read in another thread you fooled around and disabled "Services" you may have shot yourself in the foot with that, Windows 7 DOES NOT need to be tweaked like XPired did, it is counter-productive and you accomplish nothing in the long-run.

I think that I only disabled three services that were set to automatic.

According to my notes,
Distributed Link Tracking Client, Disabled
IP Helper, Disabled
Offline Files, Disabled

I didn't change anything that was set to manual. I may have also disabled windows search, but I think I just disabled that in the control panel uninstall software utility.

Is there anything there that may have caused an issue?

I really don't like the fact that windows forces you to have everything under the sun installed on your computer, weather you use it or not, and just lets you enable/disable things. I guess it's easier for them to support, but I buy OEM installers that they don't support anyway. My install is like 13GB, which is like 7 times larger than an Ubuntu 64-bit OS. Good thing drive space is pretty cheap now.

It does seem that Windows 7 doesn't need to be tweaked as much as XP did, but it also seems to be pretty inflexible. I probably just need to learn it better.

LMHmedchem

You could use the tutorial here to install the tools, and then follow the subsection called "Creating a Shutdown trace" to get a trace of the shutdown process.