I am having very slow shut down issues on not just one but two brand new laptops that I am convinced are related to the installation of Visual Studio 2013 Desktop and Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate.

Laptop 1: I purchase a brand new Lenovo Y50 laptop with Win8.1, i7, 8GB ram 1TB hybrid drive two weeks ago. After the initial setup and doing all my windows updates I installed Office 365 did more windows updates until none were available. I was very happy with the sub 20 second start-up/boot and sub 15 second shut down. Then I installed Java, Visual Studio 2013 Desktop (a few days later VS 2012 Ultimate), Steam, DayZ. Updated DirectX, and video drivers. It wasn't actually until the next day that I noticed that the shut down took a very long time.  Start-up took only a few seconds longer but shutdown took around 1 minute and 40 seconds!!!!  This is on a brand new clean system almost from day two. It NEVER occurred to me that Visual Studio could be causing the slowdown. I thought it was a hardware issue that manifest itself after a few hours of burn-in and not having hours and hours of time because of (work and school) to figure out why this this is so slow to shut down I exchanged it yesterday for a brand new Y50.

Laptop 2: AGAIN after doing the initial setup and installing all the windows updates I was once again very happy that this machine. As with the first one, I was very happy with the sub 20 second start-up and sub 15 second shut down due to the hybrid drive.  This time I only installed Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate and update 2 (need that version for school). I restarted the system and immediately I noticed that I went from sub 15 second shutdown to around 1 minute and 40 seconds again. I have booted the computer and shut it down several times to the Start screen and even if I shut it down without having launched any programs it takes 1:40 min to shut down.

I am convinced that it is Visual Studio that is causing the very slow shut down. I have not uninstalled or done a system restore in hopes that a expert could have me troubleshoot this on my machine to try and figure out why VS is causing the slow shutdown issue. 

Please help and thank you...

Tom

installed Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate and update 2 (need that version for school). I restarted the system and immediately I noticed that I went from sub 15 second shutdown to around 1 minute and 40 seconds again.

Sounds like you have two cases you could compare event traces for, using either ProcMon or WPRUI.