Explorer.exe hangs on shutdown

One of the computers in the office where I work hangs when the user shuts down in the evening. The error dialog says there are two processes still running, and the title bar of the dialog says "explorer.exe error". The message in the dialog says something like "The instruction at "0xXXXXXXXX" referenced memory at "0xXXXXXXXX", The memory could not be "written. Click OK to close." There is an OK button and when you click it, the computers finishes it's shutdown with no further hang up. Windows explorer is the stuck process shown. I've done a little research on it and some of the suggestions are to clear the temporary internet files, which I did, but that didn't help and I wonder if they were thinking IE and not the Windows explorer which is different. Any Ideas ?

So it's a work computer, do you have administrative access for it?

If you do and just want to ignore the reason for the crashes you can add the 'autoendtasks' entry to the registry with a value of 1 (Google it for specifics.) It will automatically close any crashed/hung apps without needing your input to 'OK it', the computer will shut down on its own (at a quicker rate to.)

grizzly said:

One of the computers in the office where I work hangs when the user shuts down in the evening. The error dialog says there are two processes still running, and the title bar of the dialog says "explorer.exe error". The message in the dialog says something like "The instruction at "0xXXXXXXXX" referenced memory at "0xXXXXXXXX", The memory could not be "written. Click OK to close." There is an OK button and when you click it, the computers finishes it's shutdown with no further hang up. Windows explorer is the stuck process shown. I've done a little research on it and some of the suggestions are to clear the temporary internet files, which I did, but that didn't help and I wonder if they were thinking IE and not the Windows explorer which is different. Any Ideas ?

Well, the computer in question does shut down, but the user still gets a dialog of some kind. The dialog appears and then closes itself after 2 or 3 seconds and the computer will finish shutting down without user intervention. Having that dialog appear is not what I would call a clean shutdown though. It looks like it's referencing a memory address that it can't read, something like a "The instruction at "0xXXXXXXXX" referenced memory at "0xXXXXXXXX", The memory could not be "written". message. with an OK button on it. It doesn't really stay up long enough to read it all before closing itself. Not very clean considering it's a nice new machine.

Is there any easy way to suppress this error message on shutdown ?