win2000 freezes during shutdown/reboot?

[DMS]

I loaded win2000 recently on a ASUS A7V133 (VIA chipset) 850mhz tbird (256mb RAM, with a Matrox G450 twinhead video card).  For a brief period it was behaving normally but then when I told it to shutdown or reboot it began to go to the black screen with the blinking hyphen and no further.

I  had to cut the power to get it to turn off or reboot.  Normally that black screen and hyphen is the last normal screen before shut down I believe ....

Thinking there was some kind of corruption, I fdisked the drive, formatted and reloaded everything only to arrive back at the same shutdown/reboot problem a little while after re-install.

I was wondering if it is a 3rd party driver conflict (HP cd burner, USB scanner) or something.  Not sure how to troulble shoot it.  

Any ideas of what kind of thing causes this and how I can fix it?

[Josetann]

Could be any number of things.  First, apply the most recent service pack (SP2 as of now) and check windowsupdate for any critical patches.  Browse it for any other updates that seem relevant to your setup.  If this doesn\'t help, then you\'ll need to download msconfig from the downloads section here, and see what all is being run at startup.  Basically start unchecking things you don\'t need to be run every time you start up.

Unlike Win98, I don\'t think you can uncheck something critical to the system in the startup tab of msconfig in Windows 2000.  All the critical processes are run as services.  Of course if I turn out to be wrong, and you uncheck something that keeps your PC from booting, just boot to safe mode, run msconfig, and recheck the last thing(s) you unchecked, and reboot again.

[rdc]

you could also disable hardware you do not need to start up in the device manager  one by one and enable again iif it doesn\'t help but you must at least have the last service pack .