System is reluctant to shutdown.

[kandrathe]

I think you might be the victim of hidden process clutter, either by your own doing or by spyware. Use a good virus scanner and something like ad-aware first to insure their isn't a bunch of hidden junk.

Use "task manager" and the "services" administrative option to figure out what is running. When the system is running clean, I like to take a screen shot of these pages for times like these. Even in prior versions of windows, if one process refuses to terminate, then the whole shutdown will take long or even refuse to shutdown.

Use task manager to terminate extraneous processes -- some are system processes which you will not be allowed to stop, others are required and will cause instability if you stop them.

Use services to stop any non-essential services that are running. How do you know what is non-essential? You need to know a bit about the OS. The worst you'll do is force a hard shutdown.

The other thought I had is that XP allows you to "suspend" your session, which writes the contents of memory to the hard disk. Depending on the hardware, that might take some time. Are you shutting down, or suspending?