ME Shutdown

[labwitch]

Hi, all!
This wouldn't be a big deal except that our students are generally not bright enough to turn a computer off. We have Win. ME laptops, and normally, if you select shutdown from the start menu, the computer shuts down and turns off immediately. Now, all of a sudden, if you select shut-down, you get the old "It is Now Safe to Turn Off Your Computer" message and it waits for you to switch it off. Again, it's not a big deal except that our students don' t like to have to shut down or turn computers off and act confused. If anyone knows of a fix, I'd be grateful.
labwitch

[BipolarBill]

This just started? What did you change on the PCs?

Look in Device Manager > System for error flags.

[leprechaun_40]

Did you have the students doing something just before this started? Something may have altered the shutdown commands.

Are they networked? Possibly a viral thing? Seems odd that they all started doing it at once.

[rangeral]

For one thing you can tell them not to shutdown, you will shutdown at the end of the session or school day.

[labwitch]

Hi, All!
Thanks for the suggestions. Shutting down the computers at the end of the day isn't viable, since they are laptops that we check out to the students on an as-requested basis--and the lab managers are not the ones checking the computers out to the students.

The laptop was left alone for 4 weeks over the holidays--no one checked it out, no one turned it on. The last time we checked it out, before Christmas, it wasn't doing this. We turned it on after Christmas and voila! There the problem was.

I should also mention that we've had several other problems with this computer--problems that would start from out of the blue after months of normal operation: losing the control panel; demanding an extra Windows login after the Novell login. Problems that started mysteriously in the night.

The students are ostensibly unable to tamper with the computer, we have Deep Freeze on it.

Thanks for the ideas, if you have any more, keep them coming.

[rraehal]

This usually has to do with power settings or features such as ACPI or APM. We have computers that do not shutdown with Windows 2000 on them. We changed the option in the Power Control Panle to Force APM 1.0 Mode and they shut off now. Maybe this got turned on or off, Maybe the BIOS reset itself over the 4 weeks you talked about. Are all the WinME updates installed?

Maybe you need to format and reinstall, losing the control panel and other problem you have had may be signs of software corruption or bad clusters on the HDD. I had bad clusters mess up my registry until I formatted ran a thorough scandisk, after the reinstall there were no problems with the registry.

[labwitch]

Thanks, rraehal, for the suggestions! I tend to believe you're correct. My boss suggested that there may be a correlation betweent the shutdown problem and Deep Freeze, since it doesn't happen when D/f is disabled. Maybe? I'm not sure. If anyone has experience with running Deep Freeze on ME, please let me know.

As always, everyone's help is much appreciated.