That would happen sometimes and I could only shutdown by press/hold power button. Not very kool...

BUT I think I've figured it out. Maybe this can help somebody else.

I'm running XP(home) on a 2 year old Dell so it's not the fastest around. In addition BOINC is cranking along pegging the CPU % at close to or at 100%. So far so good...life is fine...workunits are computing...etc.

Then "work" pops up. I have to use the AT&T Network Client to do VPN tunneling to work. It all seems to go fine until I shutdown that AT&T Client. That's where it would hang.

Remember, BOINC is running so everything is just a little bit slower... When I kill the Client s/w I can
see the run light come on at odd intervals and watching for a while, indicated that it's probably that Client cleanup... An extended light-on instance corresponds to the same time that I would have exited the AZT&T client (disconnect then exit).

I believe that exiting in the middle of cleanup caused the rug to be jerked out from under that client and caused it to be caught in an infinite cleanup loop. Just guessing but 32 years in the business provided a little insight...

The answer is "patience". Disconnect the client and watch the run light. Wait for it to quiesce (10 sec ?) and then kill the client. Once I did that -> voila' ....no more hangs.

If you have a similar problem, just try counting to 10.

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