My Samsung laptop running windows vista will no longer shut down properly. A few days ago I allowed it to instal a new version of Norton 360, this was co-incidental with installing an updated version of Garmin mapping software. I now have to cut the power at source to turn it off. System restore does nothing to resolve the problem, but it does make all the norton software disappear completely.
When you're ready to shutdown ..
Open task manager to see what's running. Look for processes you recognise by name and try closing one at a time until shut's down sucessfully.
Use MSConfig or the actual program settings to make sure prog does not automatically run when Windows starts.
Try this first.