Windows XP forum: Very slow shut down

thanx for ur reply mark. yes i have antispyware, antivirus, and firewall running. I have zonealarm security suite which actually was the first thing i installed on my laptop and my indexing service was already off and i dont have that many processes running. i think i might have figured out the problem. The first day i got it i installed a chinese language pack. i went to microsoft's site and they said people have these problems if they install an east asian language pack. so now my question to u or anyone who can help is how does one uninstall a language pack?

i went the the regional and language options but then do i just uncheck the languages? i think i need to get the whole simplified chinese thing out of my whole computer.

there are currently 33 processes running including firefox and trillian and those two i usually close before shutting down my computer. oh by the way i have more processes running on another older computer that doesnt even have 1 gig or ram and shut down is just fine.

although I am kinda sorry that it has proved to be ZoneAlarm in your case. As a firewall it has proved over the years to be a pretty good product, at least for us non-expert users.

But by adding functions like anti-virus and anti-spyware, and changing it's internal checks to cover many more processes, it has become bigger and more cumbersome.

When I added an external USB hard disk to my system some months ago it worked fine for a while. Then ZA was updated and I didn't realize that the upgrade had turned on both the anti-virus and the anti-spyware feature automatically. Suddenly connecting up the external disk slowed down my computer, and trying to explore the disk caused what I thought were freezes. I use the external as a second, short-term, backup, and unknown to me everytime I attached the drive ZA was virus and spyware checking it. It wasn't until I tuned these off after found that they had been turned on that I got my system back to normal.

If you haven't yet installed a new firewall, and if you were using ZA Pro with these features, perhaps you could try re-installing ZA but then turn off the anti-virus and anti-spyware, and just use ZA as a firewall. Also turn off it's email checking feature.

But that's your own choice of course.

Good luck.

Mark

I purchased ZA Pro for two reasons. Firstly I had been using the free version for a number of years, and thought it was time to pay back,

The other reason is that the Pro version has some nice features, like IP tracking, a Whois to help find the people who are trying to hack me. I have rarely used that feature though. Even if I know who these people are, there is little I can do about it. They will just move on.

I suspect the free version is now just as bloated as the paid version,so I will stick with the paid version for now.

I have used AVG Free anti-virus for some time. I should really use their paid version. Perhaps soon. For anti-spyware I use Windows Defender, Spybot, SpywareBlaster and Ewido, (now AVG anti-spyware), but only Windows Defender runs continuously, I use the others as backup checks. I also have a small utility, just a few KB in size called Startup Monitor. All it does is warn me if anything is trying to set itself to run at startup. I like it because of its size but as Windows Defender and, (I believe), ZoneAlarm do the same, I reckon I might have overkill there.

I also use CCleaner to clean out all temporary files, history and TIF's, (Temporary Internet files). Ohh, and I run rootkit revealers occasionally.

I'm not paranoid. I am a stable, well-balanced person!

Mark

If you no longer need a language template pack, you can uninstall it by using Add or Remove Programs in Control Panel. Uninstalling removes the language template files from the \TEMPLATE\LCID directories.

I would go to Control Panel and uncheck what you don't want, then uninstall.