Is it possible to implement some kind of advanced or verbose shutdown event logging. I know you can enable the verbose display messages as per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325376 however is there any way of something like this but for event logging? We have a lot of servers that are scheduled to shutdown on the 3rd and 4th sunday of every month for the Windows Update installation finalisation, however I can never get to the bottom of it because the event logs don't really show that much information on what it got stuck doing. Does any body have any advise in this regard of the best way to diagnose why servers don't successfully shutdown/reboot?

hi tawney,There are multiple components involved here , we need to isolate few components to make sure there is no problem with normal shutdown and also you need to check if the issue is related to the scheduled tasks which you have configured .What is the actual behavior ?, does the windows updates install and system wont restart ?or does windows updates wont get installed and the system wont restart ?

This isn't related to the scheduled tasks or the updates, that was just an example. Actually the server apperas to "hang" shutting down. Doing a normal start > shutdown > restart. Or by using shutdown /f /r /t 00 it will always "hang". No mouse, no keyboard. Nothing. I have tried as many diagnostic shutdowns as possible. (No services, limited processes running etc). I cannot seem to find fault of any process or any service stopping the shutdown process. It appears perhaps maybe this is a kernal or driver issue? I have performed all firmware and driver updates for the server, which is an IBM x3500 and I have updated all the latest firmware and drivers as per IBM's recommendation. I am interested in the diagnostic shutdown because I would like to know if a particular driver or dll is "freezing" the OS on shutdown. Any ideas?