Laptop will not close down until power button pressed & held

[Andrew N]

My Toshiba laptop hangs when close down selected - normal display, "closing down" on screen. It could be the result of a recent update, but the restore facility relies on a normal shutdown.Any assistance would be appreciated.

 

[TrainableMan]

If the system won't shutdown without a hard power off then some program is running & refusing to close. Choose the shut down option & wait 2 min then hit ctrl+alt+del & start task manager. Right-click & end apps/programs that are yours, such as "Internet Explorer", "Chrome", "Firefox". Then try shutting down. Once you find & terminate the program blocking shut down then it should shutdown correctly. If you find out which program it is then you will know what to kill/end in the future any time it refuses to shutdown properly.

 

[Andrew N]

Thank you for the advice. Unfortunately, once the closing down screen appears, my mouse becomes inoperative as does the keyboard, so I can't "Ctrj+Alt+Delete".

The problem exists even if no program has been running, ie shutting down immediately once the system settles after switch on.

The 'sleep' or 'hibernate'f unctions operate OK, as does the safe mode.

 

[TrainableMan]

Something is running in the background; it may be some hidden program like an updater or something but that is what causes shut-down problems. I would download (not use the online version) of Microsoft's Process Explorer Process Monitor & choose the "show details for all processes option" then use the "shutdown" > "shutdown" option from the Process Explorer menu and see if it shuts down & if not see what is still in the list of running programs.

 

[Andrew N]

Thank you for the suggestion, but even if I close immediately after opening, the fault is still present.

 

[bestazy]

If you are actually are trying to shut down /turn off, there could be a lot of other things going on as well. You could have a process preventing shut down (although Windows will usually tell you so) or something corrupted preventing normal shutdown.

A third party utility might reveal whats happening. I'm a big fan of Glary Utilities (Freeware) You can download and try out at glarysoft.com. If you like the software, you cn support them by purchasing. It may reveal file corruption or a disk error that's preventing normal shutdown. There's such a long list of things it could be - hard to nail it down.