Problem solved

My laptop developed a slight problem recently. Nothing major, just an annoyance, whereby it was taking ages to shut down. This weekend, I really had a gutsful. I was awake in the middle of the night, and after chatting online to one of my American friends, I heard a rumble of thunder. I shut down AOL, and whipped the modem lead from the laptop, and then attempted to shut down. The bratty thing hung, as two more claps of thunder rattled the house, each closer than the last. In the end, I hit the power on/off button - which meant a delay the next time I booted up, as my machine insists on running chkdsk after each forced shutdown.

Anyway, I did a little research this afternoon, and finally located the problem in my Windows Event Viewer.

Error ID: 1500 Windows saved user ACER-XXXXXXXXXX\Siani registry while an application or service was still using the registry during log off. The memory used by the user's registry has not been freed. The registry will be unloaded when it is no longer in use.

That was the problem identified. The solution took a little while to unearth, but it came via Microsoft. This surprised me, because whenever Windows plays silly beggars, it's usually up to third party software writers to come up with a solution. After a bit of googling, I ended up reading a Microsoft Knowledge Base article, which recommended this tool: User Profile Hive Cleanup Service. It's only available to legitimate Windows users, so you have to go through a validation process first. I installed it and now my laptop shuts down in an acceptable time.