Yeah, XP stutdowns and hibernations only take a couple of seconds on my laptop.

There was a classic problem on NT4 Server with MS Exchange. As soon as you installed Exchange NT suddenly took 10 minutes to shutdown.

It was caused by the fact that the Exchange server service could take a while to shutdown on occasions, so when Exchange was installed it changed the registry setting that determines how long a service is allowed to shutdown. If I remember correctly the setting before was 60 seconds and after it is 600 seconds.

Unfortunately there was lots of NT4 boxes with NT services that worked fine, except that they hung on shutdown. Before the Exchange install this wasn't a major problem, after the Exchange install your NT4 box sat locked up for 10 minutes at shutdown.

Don't you just love it when a seemingly "safe" change hits a bunch of people when unexpectedly...