Hi, I recently got broadband on monday evening, and upon tuesday I discovered that my computer will not do ANYTHING when I click "Shut Down", "Log Off", or "Restart". It won't even do anything when I press the power button (on the system) once. The only way I can shut it down is to hold in the systems power button until it turns off about 5 secs later. I know this is bad for the system so I want to fix it staright away. I check the BIOS settings and from what I can tell nothing seems to be wrong, and the Control Panel settings are correct in the "power Options" menu. It is currently selected at "When I press the power button on my computer... Turn off", but for some reason it's not working. I've had this problem once before and it turned out I had a virus that was doing it, but I've run VET Anti-Virus on an entire system scan twice and it hasn't detected anything. Can somebody PLEASE help me, it would be very much apreciated! Thanks, Michael

What sort of NIC card do you have? Linksys, D-Link, etc. I had this problem when I went to broadband using a Linksys NIC card. I switched to a D-Link and the problem was solved. Hope this suggestion helps.

Could be a programme hanging, open task manager when you try to shut down and see what programmes/apps are not terminating. If you can round it down to one programme, try a re-install of it. Norton 2003 gave me the same problem a while back... Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something, and if everybody does something, then everything will be done.

How to Perform a Clean Boot in Windows XP This article describes how to disable common startup programs, settings, and drivers to troubleshoot issues in Windows XP. This procedure is known as "clean booting." Can be done by way of Windows Safe-Mode.

Thanks everyone for your comments. To fix it I actually just did a System Restore which did the trick. Just a quick question, is it bad for a pc to do a system restore or not?