It's My Turn To Ask For Computer Help

Well, my laptop runs fine, but for the past year something weird’s been happening after I try to shut it down. I have Windows 2000, and this is the only “problem” I’ve ever had with it.

After I go “Start”, “Shut Down”, “OK”, I get the usual graying screen then one or more boxes come up. There seems to be some programs that always “hang”, or just won’t shut down and Windows has to do it for me. In other words there’s a box with a bar until the program shuts down. The most common I’ve had are CCapp.exe and AOLDial.exe, but I’ve also had a Fax program “hang”, but I never used any such program before.

So I guess what I’m trying to ask is, what causes a program to “hang?”

I’ve no idea what causes it to hang, but when it happened to my computer, we had to clear it completely to get it working properly, 'cause it had gone to shit.

It’s funny because the computer seems to working fine. It’s just that these programs “hang” before it can shutdown. I’ve asked the computer people at my college say that if it doesn’t bother me, don’t worry about it, but if I wanted them to go away, I’d have to reformat. I’m just wondering if there’s an alternate solution.

Run > msconfig, then switch them off at startup maybe? I’m not sure about CCap (that may be a Norton utility if I remember correctly) but if you don’t use fax or AOL then you should be okay with not having them on.

I do use AOL and Norton (yes it is a Norton Utility), so that wouldn’t be good. The fax thing only showed up once though.

Try and uninstall and reinstall the programs that hang.

I think that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to wait until next week when I start college again to use its T1 line for updates.

What Nulani suggested is probably the best way. On most windows systems, the registry naturally deteriorates as time passes and this sometimes affects a program’s ability to properly shut down. I know I’ve had problems in the past with programs that would crash and terminate whenever I closed them.