Shutting down Win 7 started taking 20-30 seconds

My PC started taking ~30 seconds to shut down recently. This never happened before. I must add that it doesn't always happen. If I restart / shut down soon after turning the computer, it shuts down in under 5 seconds. But if I use it for several hours then it takes half a minute or so.

I can't think of many things I changed, but I remember installing a number of Windows updates and also new Catalyst 12.10 video card drivers.

Things I've tried:

1. Checked the "ClearPageFileAtShutdown" setting, it's 0.
2. Tried this tutorial and used the 2 second thing, no change.
3. Enabled verbose startup, shutdown, logon, and logoff status Messages. This was pretty useless as when shutting down it cycles through "Stopping services" and other stuff faster than I can read, but then gets stuck on the "Shutting down" part, not very informative

There doesn't seem to be any hung apps because I get no prompt to end task (I got that a few times before, and it seems to happen way before it goes into the "Shutting down" message).


So what exactly is Windows 7 doing at the "Shutting down" part?

I would not run Catalyst or any other driver bloatware package, just the driver itself.

Establish a Clean Boot, test your hardware, scan the log for repeat errors to resolve, utlilize System Resources to solve Problems from these Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7

check your system resources ( CPU utilization, Hard disk space, RAM utilization ) and make sure that there is no application consuming your resources and causing windows to slow down. and try to defrag your harddisk.