text: why won't my desktop computer shutdown without freezing? i have an hp pavilion a450y running xp service pack 2. every time i try to shut the computer down, restart it, or put it to sleep, it freezes on the very last screen. it's a blue screen that says "windows is shutting down".  the only way i can get it to do anything after that is to hold the power button down and then do a hard restart. it used to do this only occassionally. now it does it every time.  any ideas on how to troubleshoot or repair this? someone suggested bios, but i updated that to no avail. any other tricks, or good programs for helping me troubleshoot it? you could limit the services that start on boot up, either in administrative tools from the control panel or go to start run, type msconfig, and go to startup uncheck unecessary programs for startup when booting.  run a defrag on your disk, you can compress to save some space.  you can also upgrade your memory, run a check for virus or spyware and remove.