When I click on Restart, I get the blinking face and question mark. When I shutdown, the machine starts up properly next time. Does anyone know why this is happening?

possibly something running in background (printer port), or set to run at shutdown(virus scanner), try starting with extensions off,check extension manager and control panels settings for conflicts, or any recently installed programs, disable temporarly if being the cause, then restart 6B 69 6C 72 6F 79 20 77 61 73 20 68 65 72 65

when you shut down, all the memory buffers are properly cleared, ram set to zero, firmware loaded from scratch. all those kind of things. so... maybe a hardware prob. do a clean install or boot off external HD and see what happens. by elimination you should be able to work out where the prob is. a flashing question mark in this case means the hard disk hasn't started to spin up. maybe you have jumpers/ settings that prevent it from spinning up. can you hear it? Only on shut down does it reset properly. Can you boot from a CD and shutdown/restart properly?