From: "Frank Haber" 

You can throw rotten fruit, and pardon me for asking, but you're
*absolutely* sure there's no spyware lurking?  You have turned off
"reboot on bluescreen," yes, and looked up any stopcodes?

Just to encourage you (not), and to show you how tetchy computers can be in
the API area, let me tell you a story of some Win98 Sony desktops.  At one
point I supported a lot of them.  They cam with 98-original.  An app needed
98SE.  98SE was notorious for shutdown problems on many machines, and I
produced a doozy.  The machines would reboot when shutdown, and became
totally incapable of either a warm boot or a "reboot the GUI
only" cycle.  You also couldn't go to the "gaming" DOSbox,
and any attempt to fiddle with WINBOOT.INI produced an instant hard hang. 
There were two Microsoft patches for this. Neither worked.  There were many
drastic registry patches.  I settled on forcing ACPI (the hardware was
there, but the enumeration/PCI ID was broken, and Sony, the b*stards,
rarely does BIOS updates).  That worked about half the time, and the
symptoms varied machine-machine.  On most of them, when shutdown failed,
you hung at a flashing text cursor (BEYOND the "now it's safe to shut
down" screen).  CHKDSK *didn't* run on the next boot.  All was well
except for the 2% of the time when CHKDSK did run.  I got called on every
one of these.

Well, most of the machines were retired and the SIMMS stolen for use
elsewhere (printers).  I recently had occasion to fire up a couple for a
legacy shoot. I discovered something.  Running the machines with *two*
sticks of memory, rather than the factory 128 on one SIMM, fixed the
shutdown problems 99%.  Bus termination?  My deodorant?  Go figure.

Yes, I exonerate Microsoft on this one.  Yes, it's a hardware problem.  But
I also say, "Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we abandon the
good old reliable Big Orange Switch."  That doesn't rhyme.  Sue me.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5