Why won't my Vista computer shut down properly?

[leroyjenkens]

I shut down and it sits on the screen saying "shutting down" forever.
This started happening, I think, after I installed Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. I dealt with it until I beat the game, then uninstalled the game, but this problem is still happening.
I had two network drivers in device manager that had an exclamation point next to them and it said that they're not working properly. I uninstalled both of those and the problem is still happening.
When I shut down, there's no applications running in task manager. There's nothing on my task bar.
I looked at ntbtlog.txt and it has a huge list of different things. About a thousand or more. A few hundred say "Did not load driver".
I have no idea what to do. I don't want to go into windows and start deleting all the files that ntbtlog said were not loaded.
This wouldn't be quite so annoying if I didn't have to hold the power button on my computer for 58 million millennia before it finally turns the computer off.

 

[chaoseverlasting]

You could try using a registry script to automatically shut down. That may work. You can find the reg code online somewhere.

 

[rcgldr]

did not load driver

It's unlikely to be one of those. NT and later systems first load the interface specific low level drivers (like SATA, USB, ...), then it makes calls to those drivers to report any connected devices. Then for each device found, it goes through a loop loading device specific mid-level drivers for that device type (hard drive, game controller, ...), stopping if that device type driver reports it it supports that specific device, or continuing until it finds a device specific driver that does, or giving up if it never finds a driver.

I have an old Intel 2ghz P4 system that XP can't shut down, even after a fresh install, but Windows 2000 or older can shut it down. I never figured out what the problem was. MS support also gave up.