Well, I have the same issue on my Win98SE tower. It has a Pentium 4. For now, I'm just cutting the power to the computer. I don't think I'm having your other problems, but I've been having other problems, including in DOS more or DOS under Windows. I'm sorry I wasn't helpful. 🙁

Updates?
windowsupdaterestored.com

Harry Potter wrote on 2024-08-13, 11:48:

Well, I have the same issue on my Win98SE tower. It has a Pentium 4. For now, I'm just cutting the power to the computer. I don't think I'm having your other problems, but I've been having other problems, including in DOS more or DOS under Windows. I'm sorry I wasn't helpful. 🙁

No worries! Always good to know I’m not alone in this problem. I could just boot into dos to remedy that problem and just continue cutting the power to bypass the shutdown issue.

Every time I've had this happen, it's some driver that doesn't want to unload. On my Windows 95 box the latest Nvidia reference driver for the Riva 128 causes it. One way to help narrow it down is to press F8 when windows is booting, and choose the option that generates bootlog.txt. Normally this is used to troubleshoot why windows is failing to start up properly, but it also logs drivers being unloaded on shutdown too. At least, I'm pretty sure it does, it's been a while. So turn on your computer, hit F8, generate the bootlog.txt, then have Windows shut down again. See if it gets stuck on a driver it's trying to unload.

I have tried the file before to see what was causing problems at startup but couldn't find it. 🙁 Where would it be located?

For me, when my computer would hang on shutdown, I just checked what the last line was. I believe I saw that it was attempting to unload some nvblahblahblah.vxd file associated with my Riva128, but I never saw confirmation it unloaded. So I assumed that was my problem. Installed some manufacturer specific drivers from Diamond and my problems went away.

I don't know where the resulting file is located. I tried using DIW/S/B BOOTLOG.TXT but didn't find it. 🙁

It should just be in c:\bootlog.txt

Oh. Thank you, and sorry for the stupid question. 🙁

From personal experience, for me it was either related to USB or Creative Live! drivers

My experience is windows shuts down ok until I try applying updates
but it's definitely not 1 single thing that causes it and is a matter of finding the right combination specific for your setup

I had this issue for months, and it randomly resolved itself last night after installing DirectX 9.0c to fix an unrelated issue.