The title says it all, really. It plays the “Shutdown music” and the shutdown screen comes up. Then nothing for between five and ten minutes. Then everthing powers down. I haven’t installed any new software. I’ve run all the spy-ware filters and virus scanners I have. Still nothing. This has been going on for just over a week now.
It’s more annoying than anything, but does anyone have any ideas?
Take forever to shutdown if you do it from the DOS command?
Try START>RUN>shutdown.exe and see what happens.
I’m trying that now (and c:\windows\system32\shutdown.exe just to be sure).
I’ve typed both commands in but I’m still up, running and posting 
Hmmm. Do you get a lot of disk activity when it is taking forever to shut down? If so, it is probably clearing out your page file, which can take a while. This article explains how to disable the behavior. The alternate method at the bottom is probably best.
This probably isn’t what’s happening, though.
What non-essential services do you have turned on? I had a similar problem once, and it was due to the Logitech drivers for my keyboard. So I uninstalled that and the problem was solved.
Does your virus scan check drives automatically when you shutdown? This can make things take forever.
Is this a standalone desktop or by any chance is it a laptop, especially one that travels between home and office?
I’ve has this happen few times. In each case it was some utility program (not a virus) that Windows had to literally beat to death at shutdown to get it to quit. In the last instance it was a set of third party drivers for a 3-D Logitech mouse that could give vibration feedback. Logitech had stopped supporting this mouse and the “touch” drivers were only available form the company Logitech had licensed the technology from. Anyway, removed the drivers and problem solved.
I only solved it by defeating, one by one, all the utilities that load at start up and re-starting and shutting down the system. It’s tedious but it worked to ID the culprit.
Start >Run> type “msconfig”> enter> startup> for the applet menu you need to control startup programs.