Rick,

I do not see how hanging the computer is a solution either, you'll end up rebooting; or giving a dialog to end the offending task which will cause the corruption you describe anyways, granted with user aproval.

I do not believe is the responsibility of the OS trying to maintain the data integrity of third party programs that refused to comply with the OS commands (as in ORDERS), as I also think is your take when you recognize it is a bug in the OS shutdown timeout procedure. Bottom line, I still stand by my comment disagreeing with you about "This isn't really a Vista problem but a badly behaved app problem..." as I still see that the OS must reign over any other software, and the User should reign over the OS, with appropiate limitations of his rights of course.

In the end, I do not mind a dialog asking me if I want to terminate a program that is not responding (and it would be much better if it gives me some description, not Xryx.exe <g>), providing that it will timeout and proceed anyways (as sometimes does indeed) my beef is with those dialogs that stay forever (that wouldn't they be so bad if they are instantaneous after you say "Reboot" so you do not need to stare at the screen for 2 minutes to see it actually shuting down <g>)

>I'm not sure that I agree. Outlook is a perfect example. If you're in the middle of an Outlook data file update and you let the OS yank the plug you'll likely corrupt the Outlook file.
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>Worse think of a VFP app running in the background while it's processing - we all know what happens to VFP data files when you kill them mid-update no?
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>The OS is supposed to send a shut down message and wait for a specified amount of time, but I believe that timeout is broken. This is a known bug and apparently will be fixed (or maybe has been already addressed by an update).
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>The particular bug/problem as I remember with Outlook is that it acknowledges teh shutdown request, but then fails to actually shut down and just keeps on running. I think if the app doesn't actually acknowledge the shutdown request the OS will yank the process eventually when the timeout is up.
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>+++ Rick ---