Home | Resource Guides | Tech Tips | Network Administration | Certification

Tech Tips › Windows NT › Startup and Shutdown

Tech Tips / Windows NT / Startup and Shutdown

Speeding up application shutdowns

How quickly they forget the days of DOS. No matter how quick and reliable users' systems are, they're always complaining about waiting a few seconds for an app to shut down.

Of course, you get impatient with this stuff, too. The wait for some applications to shut down, particularly some 16-bit legacy apps, can seem interminable. You can speed things up with a quick registry edit. Here's how:

1. Open the registry editor.
2. Navigate to HKEY_USER\YourUserId\Control Panel\Desktop.
3. Add the value AutoEndTasks (REG_SZ). If you set this to 1, all tasks that don't respond immediately to a shutdown command will be killed.

With the value WaitToKillTimeout (REG_SZ) within the same key, you can also change the amount of time NT waits before killing an application. The default value is 20,000 milliseconds. Reducing it to 10,000 or 5,000 milliseconds might make the wait more tolerable.

Note: Registry editing can be risky; be sure you have a verified backup before you begin.