"1) Start - Run - Regedit
Navigate to the following Registry key:
HKEY CURRENT USER\Control Panel\Desktop
Double click on the AutoEndTasks entry and replace the 0 with a 1 in the Value data text box
For the next two, if the dword value indicated does not exist, create it:
Double click on the WaitToKillAppTimeout entry in the right pane and change the Value data to 2000
Double click on the HungAppTimeout entry in the right pane and change the Value data to 1000
Reboot
If still having a problem, make the next change:
2) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control
Right-click on WaitToKillServiceTimeout and change it to 2000"
and it seemed ok...shutdown faster...but had a problem with uttorent, i guess it wasnt getting a chance to shutdown properly and would always come back with resume.dat corrupt and would have to recheck all my torrents (which is a lengthy process with many big torrents), so i put all those values up to 15000 and utorrent seems cool now but if i shutdown with Firefox open then it comes back with a warning about last session closed unexpectedly. so anyways i was hoping i could get someone with xp to browse thru the registry for me and check what the default values are, because something definitely dosent feel right, thank you.
Default values are 20000 - WaitToKill and 5000 for the HungApp.
Also, take note that those values you change in the Current_User section of the registry, ONLY affects the current logged in user...so those registry changes won't affect other users.
If you want a universal change (all users), change those values in the HKEY_Users\.Default\Control Panel.
