Thread: Vista misinterprets normal shutdown as 'unexpected' - then boots up again.

I have a re-currence of a problem that I experienced in my earliest days of trying to get Vista to work.

When I close down my machine, either through the 'Hibernate' or 'Shut Down' options, everything closes down as usual, even to the monitor eventually stating "No signal Detected" and the PSU slowing to a stop.

I'm just about ready to put the dust cover over the monitor, when suddenly, the 'Blue Screen' appears, informing me that "Windows has experienced an unexpected shutdown" (etc.) Then, the PC starts to boot up again.

Short of physically switching off the power cable at the appropriate moment (i.e. when the PSU has powered down), my PC looks set to remain 'on' forever.

I remember this problem in the first few days of my Vista experience. I thought it had gone forever, what with all the 'updates' bringing my installation of Vista up to date. But, it appears not.

Other than this, my Vista installation appears to be working OK - (touch wood).

This is all I can find on the issue; http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=927393 . Seems a bit drastic to flash the bios? Will keep looking to see if any alternative fix.

Something like this might be causing a conflict or driver issues; http://forums.techguy.org/windows-vi...-shutdown.html .

Thank you again Fabler - whatever would I (or many others) do without you?

The Bios update idea seems a bit unlikely in my case, given that my installation of Vista has not re-exhibited this failure to shut down until today. As the existing Bios with unchanged settings has been present since my Vista's initial install in February, it does not suggest itself as a likely cause of the present difficulty.

The device driver strategy sounds much more promising. But, I have not installed any new hardware since I bought a Samsung CLP300 colour laser printer about two weeks ago. That peripheral installed and then operated without any difficulty, using the specific Vista drivers CD supplied.

However, I did have a problem, a day or two ago, with my graphics adapter driver which went 'loopy' following the installation of "Eye to Eye"; a program which offers thousands of full-screen photos allowing one to 'explore' the whole of mainland Britain. Following the install of this program, the display unpredictably showed random artefacts as the mouse cursor was moved around. I reckoned that something in the Eye to Eye install program had corrupted the graphics driver.

So, earlier today, using Windows' Safe Mode, I uninstalled the graphics driver before restarting and then re-installing it. I uninstalled the Eye to Eye program at that point. The display problem disappeared but my next shutdown was when the present Vista problem appeared - i.e. misinterpreting it as an 'unexpected' shutdown and then restarting.

Could be graphics driver corruption? I'm assuming you have a Nvidia graphics card. When you re-installed your drivers did you use the original disc or download the latest from here?; http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us .
Also this is a useful tool to get a clean uninstall of the drivers; http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?page=driversweeper . Care must be taken if you have an Nvidia chipset!

My apologies if you have an ATI card.

I think the graphics driver is the most likely line of enquiry.

My card is a 500 Mb Sapphire HD2400 pro 64-bit DDR2 with ATI Radeon graphics. I re-installed its drivers from the CD that accompanied the card. I am aware that an update is available but download speeds from the SapphireTech.com are unbelievably slow and the 45Mb update download has timed out three times already.

When I have eventually downloaded the update I will install it and inform you of the results.

Hello Michael187, try this site; http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html . Follow the instructions to have a clean uninstall using Driver sweeper. Ignore or cancel Windows wizard when it finds new hardware and install the drivers from your desktop or wherever you downloaded to.

Hi Fabler,

I wnt to the site and was able to download a more up to date version of my graphics card drivers. So far, so good.

However, I cannot get a clean uninstall of the previous drivers, resulting in the new install getting corrupted from the start.

Could you point me to where I can obtain the "Driver Sweeper" you refer to?

Thanks again.

This is the link for driver sweeper; http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?page=driversweeper . Use the link with the installer.
Here is a link to another driver cleaner; http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/Oth...ional-15.shtml also free,although I don't know if vista compatible.

I downloaded the driver sweeper and used it according to the instructions. Alas, this is one broom that did not sweep clean, as I was still harangued, on startup, by a dialog screen inviting me to register my "new ATI product".

In despair (a familiar emotion since I got to know Vista), I opened up my PC and removed the ATI card, reverting to the on-board Nvidia 6100 graphics. The downside to this being that instead of benefitting from 500Mb of dedicated video memory, I'm now having to share up to 768Mb of the main system's 2Gb of memory.

Anyway, everything now seems back to normal. I get proper shutdowns and no artefacts on screen.

Thanks again Fabler, for your assistance.

I would have replied sooner but for problems logging on to this site. I log in using mu usual details, then it goes to a screen saying "Ooops! We couldn't find the page you wanted!" and that's it!

Today I think I got lucky - persistence pays.