Hello Tech, thanks for the response.
Generally, systems with more than one account with admin privileges could get in hot waters... sooner or later...
XP set both accounts up with Admin privileges by default during installation. This was a new, clean, install after re-partitioning and reformatting the system HD which I undertook precisely because I was trying to resolve this issue. In the previous installation I had one of the accounts set as an ordinary user but this made no difference.
Incidentally at least one of the user accounts needs to be Admin because the default "Administrator" account only becomes available if XP is started in safe mode.
Did you change Windows policies in order to 'ask for logoff' before shutdown?
I haven't made such a change. In fact so far I've been unable to find the Policy Editor. However the main problem is with logoff rather than shutdown. It's true that shutdown is also affected but only because the logoff fails.
Are you sure you haven't wrongly tweaked your Windows installation?
As stated above this is a new clean installation. Other than setting up the look and feel of the GUI and the start menu I haven't tweaked anything.
When the second and subsequent users click the "Log Off" button and confirm with the "Log Off" button in the pop-up dialog nothing happens. The machine just sits waiting indefinitely until interrupted by Ctrl/Alt/Del. I have a hunch, no more than that, that this could be related to either the ZoneAlarm firewall or the Avast anti-virus scanner but was hoping to avoid having to eliminate them from the investigation by de-installing them. I hoped that maybe someone might have seen this issue before and might be able to suggest something to tweak to correct it.
