Windows

I had a IBM ThinkPad that used to do that. It turned out to be an issue with the power management utility. Somehow it was hanging up the system when certain NIC drivers or protocols were loaded. I disabled power management, and that fixed it. I thenloaded the newest NIC drivers just to be sure. I still have power managment disabled though. What a bummer.

Have you tried waiting to see maybe some process is hanging or has a hard time shutting down? Try this (Log on as Administrator):

1) Open up the registry (REGEDT32.EXE)

2) Drill down to the key HKEY_USERS\.Default\Control Panel\Desktop
and change the value AutoEndTasks to 1

3) Do the same for the two keys below HKEY_USERS (S- followed by numbers)

Another fix is to create a shortcut on the desktop with the following in the command line:

c:\windows\rundll.exe user.exe,exitwindows

When the user double-clicks on the icon, it will do a "hard-shutdown" of any .dll's or device drivers that may be open. This should fix your problem.

Most of the time it is related to the TCP/IP stack being set for DHCP and WINS usage. If you are not actually using the IP stack, then delete it. If you are, but are not using a WINS server on the network, then go into the Network Config and Disable WINS. If you don't have a DHCP server, then you should be hard coding an IP address.

Also, boot Windows into Safe Mode and check for any duplicate network adapters.