Problems With Rebooting

Hello all,

I recently purchased a Toshiba Satellite U305-S7432 from Fry's. The computer came with Vista Home Premium which I promptly replaced with Windows XP Pro SP2. I downloaded relevant XP drivers from Toshiba's website and all hardware on the computer seems to work properly (dvd burner, card reader, webcam, etc.). Some of the drivers that I downloaded, however, seemed to be miscategorized by Toshiba and didn't seem to work on the system. However, I eventually found the proper drivers for all hardware.

Everything works perfectly well with the exception that every once in a while the laptop will simply refuse to reboot. It happens approximately once in every four reboots (though not exactly). Windows will get to the "Shutting Down" screen (I use the classic theme). When that window is removed the blue background and the mouse will remain indefinitely (I have tried waiting for upwards of half an hour). The mouse is responsive but nothing is on the screen other than the blue background and no key combinations work as well. Note that this screen appears when a proper reboot is about to occur. The only difference is that it will disappear it about 3 seconds, whereas when the reboot fails, it simply remains there. The only way to actually reboot the computer at this point is by holding down the power key.

There is absolutely nothing in any system logs about this. All errors and warnings seem completely irrelevant (things about SMB, DHCP, etc...).

All hardware works properly. The system has never blue screened or even given any other sort of windows error. The device manager does not show any hardware missing drivers. No memory dumps or kernel dumps are created by the system even though they are enabled. Note that if the system is rebooted by holding down the power key (after realizing that it won't reboot itself), Windows does not warn of improper shutdown on the next boot.

I have upgraded to the latest version of BIOS available on Toshiba's website. All windows updates have been applied as well.

The only information I could find online concerning something remotely similar to this was a suggestion to apply a particular Windows Hotfix and to add "/forceresetreg" to the windows line of boot.ini. I have done so and the problem persists. (Article here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822624 )

Any help would be greatly appreciated. My only hunch at this point is that it could have something to do with drivers I installed that weren't really for this system (due to the difficulty of navigating Toshiba's selection of XP drivers for this laptop). Thanks in advance.

 

My guess is that there's a driver or two that causing the reboot issue. Unfortunately, the only advice I have is to reformat and reinstall, or to remove all hardware via the control panel, use CCleaner to completely remove registry entries, and the install the drivers again.

Unless you have a grudge against Vista, I would restore the laptop to the original configuration, and give it a try. If you need XP, you can run in inside an emulator, or you can buy another drive and install XP on that one, or repartition your current drive and dual boot XP.

 

Have you scanned with any virus/spyware scanning software recently? That behavior could be a symptom of an infection.

 

Thanks for the replies.

Reformatting seems like taking the easy way out. I could always bust out the kernel debugger and start working but I was hoping there would be some intermediate solution or that perhaps somebody had gone through a similar issue.

I do have a serious grudge against Vista. Let's just say the computer will be recycled before it will have Vista installed. But let's not turn this thread into a flame war regarding that.

As for malware, I doubt that since these problems began occuring before I even managed to get the Network drivers working.

Thanks again for the replies.

Any more ideas?