Hi all,

I recently bought an ASUS A8N-E and a PNY 7900GT, so I reformatted.

XP pro would NOT auto-detect that the new Mobo was ACPI, so I had to do the F5 thing to get the right HAL going, but once I did that everything was happy.

At some point, I think after all the XP security updates were done, the shutdown process (and reboot) seemed to start hanging. I decided to wait it out and discovered that it ALWAYS shuts down after 10 minutes or so.

Yes, I'm on a home network, but there would be no reason (that I understand) why the 802.1b thing that MS mentions would be the culprit.... but that is the only solution I come up with on a google. I went into processes and turned off any that mentioned 802.1.. no change. I also saw some disturbing things while there.... remote registry edits????? why was that on by default? I killed it.

I have seen the popular shutdown debug sheet that is all over the internet, and I have tried it all.

Rebooting into safe mode (basic, no networking) does not change it. Still the same hang.

AVG and Spybot S&D found nothing... wouldn't expect them to.

So, I have two clues... the first is that XP shutdown scripts take 10 minutes to timeout, but I don't know what they are or where to find a list. The second is that XP now detects my WD SATA drive as removable.... so there is a system tray icon telling me I can turn it off and remove it, although it's my boot drive and not in RAID.

Yes, BIOS is updated, drivers are good.

ASUS A8N-E
AMD 64 3500+ (Venice)
1 gig Kingston RAM
WD SATA HD (Caviar)
HP dvd 740b DVD writer
MSI 48x CD writer
Logitech wireless KB
Logitech G5 mouse (USB)
PNY 7900GT
on-board AC '97 Realtek sound
on-board LAN

As I said, it's running like a champ, just this one bug... any ideas?

Did you ensure that ACPI was enabled in the BIOS? Sometimes, it's disable by default... that could be causing the hanging at shutdown. XP should auto-detect ACPI... you should not have to manually set it.

Thanks for the reply.

I'm thinking there was some problem with the SATA II drive at install. Perhaps the BIOS had to be upgraded first before installation... this might explain the remove HW icon AND the shutdown hang, if XP was trying to power down the HD and failing.

I'm going to pull the SATA and load onto a clean IDE drive, see if that resolves it. If not, then I'll just exchange the board, which was bought locally.

And yes, I have even tried disabling ACPI support. doesn't work.

Happy update:

While trying a fresh XP installation, I was able to isolate the shutdown problem as beginning when audio drivers were installed.

Removing the audio drivers which came with my new MB resolved the issue.

I then DL'ed and installed the newest drivers for AC '97 (they just came out a few days ago) and the problem is still gone.