It boils down to list of possible causes and eliminating them in fast and efficient manner. There is no good utility or smart trick to figure out shutdown problem. Reinstalling driver didn’t help so I had to arrange contact with support that provided latest driver version which solved issue completely. PCI card that handled video capture from security cameras was most likely suspect so I started with disabling its driver in Device Manager. I was left with drivers as possible cause. booting from LiveCD – shutdown works – eliminates BIOS and hardware.checking hard drive – no errors – probably eliminates corrupt files.disabling third party services – shutdown fails – eliminates services.Windows safe mode – shutdown fails – eliminates software.wrong ACPI configuration in BIOS or Windows installation.hardware errors and resource conflicts.software that freezes or otherwise interferes with process.On top of tracing limited to elimination and guesswork there are numerous possible causes for shutdown issues: So aside from enabling verbose status messages for startup and shutdown (which isn’t really much more verbose) I had no insight in shutdown process and what exactly goes wrong.

When developing Windows Microsoft paid a lot of attention to startup – it has numerous options, logs and capable utilities such as Process Monitor.

computer had simple hardware and was only running antivirus and video surveillance software – not many things to go wrong.Windows was completely freezing on reaching “ Windows is shutting down message” on either shutdown or reboot.

Windows xp shutdown sound