Ok, I've seen at avast site that there was an attempt to solve this problem at the 4.7.623 version. Ok... I installed avast 4.6.763 last week and everything was fine until 2 days ago, when the system becomes incredible slow to perform the shutdown (the "Windows is shutting down" screen in Windows XP home edition)... it started taking about 3 to 5 minutes to shutdown.
Well, after a lot of tests with some of the programs that were installed in my computer, I found that when I kill the ashserv.exe process, the system get back to normal shutdown delay.
Is there anything I'm missing? Is there anything I can do to solve this problem?
Juliano/Brazil
Have the same problem with Avast 4.7.xxxx
I have a complex setup in my home environment.
- Windows 2003 Active Directory Domain
- Roaming Profiles
- SmartCard Authentication
- ....
My Windows XP Workstation suffers from the same slow shutdown. When I read through this forum somebody mentioned an Event-Log entry saying that the user registry (ntuser.dat) cannot be unloaded.
That was the point when I remembered that I had the same problem in our enterprise network at our company. Lots of PCs (NT4, 2K, XP) had extremely long shutdown times.
The reason is because some buggy applications (not especially MS ones but some MS as well :-) do not close their registry handles correctly when logging off. Therefore the romaing profile (especially the ntuser.dat (= HKCU) cannot be unloaded and the system waits until these processes die before unloading the registry.
Interesting is that MS has no fix for this (is not so easy to handle this cleanly in coding) but some MS guy wrote a really cool workaround which works quiet good for such applications. It seems that the tool is kind of supported by MS and offered through the standard download channels.
We distributed it on all our company workstations and the result is really good.
So I installed it on my XP workstation and did a shutdown with ZoneAlarm and Avast fully loaded. The system went down smoothley and the message in the event log was gone. The tool is a service (uphclean.exe) and checks the open handles to the registry on shutdown. If there are some it does some cleanup work by remapping or closing them and to free HKCU for unloading.
Give it a try.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx%3Ffamilyid%3D1B286E6D-8912-4E18-B570-42470E2F3582%26displaylang%3Den&e=9797or
Google for: uphclean (it is the first link)
Hope this helps for some of you as well.