Have you ever shut down your Windows XP system, and started working on other things, only to find the machine still working away several minutes later as it worked through its shutdown process.

There are a bunch of Registry tweaks that reset Windows to close shop like it's suddenly become time concious.

Kill your apps

Some programs just don't know how to say goodbye. To speed up force-closing them at shutdown, open the Registry Editor (in Vista, press the Windows key, type regedit, and press Enter; in XP, click Start - Run, type regedit, and press Enter), and navigate in the left pane to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Desktop. Double-click WaitToKillAppTimeout in the right pane, and change the value data (measured in milliseconds) to 1000-if you're in a real hurry - or something larger, if you want to give your recalcitrant apps a little more time to call it quits. Click OK when you're done.

Clip your running tasks and services

There's another Registry key that automatically ends running tasks at shutdown. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Desktop, double-click AutoEndTasks in the right pane, and change the value data to 1.

Now to kill your slow-ending services, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control, double-click WaitToKillServiceTimeout in the right pane, change the value to 1000, and click OK.

Some people will tell you that you can speed up shutdowns by telling Windows not to clear the pagefile when it closes. Unfortunately, this could compromise your system security because sensitive data may be stored in the file unencrypted. As a result, it is recommended that you leave the ClearPageFileAtShutdown value at:

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/SessionManager/Memory Management at 1.

Some Vista systems (including mine) don't have all the Registry key entries described above. To add a missing entry, right-click in the right pane of its key, choose New > String Value, type the name, such as AutoEndTasks, double-click the new entry, add its value data (1 in the case of AutoEndTasks), and click OK.