SYMPTOMS
A badly-behaved 16-bit application may prevent Windows NT from shutting
down cleanly. Once the application misbehaves and you attempt to shut down
Windows NT, the shutdown may halt or hang, and it may be necessary to
physically turn off the power to the computer to regain use of Windows NT.
After requesting a shutdown, a dialog box with the application's name in
the title bar appears stating that the Windows application cannot respond
to the end task request. The dialog box presents three choices: Wait, End
Task, and Cancel.
If you choose End Task, after a period of time, a similar dialog appears
with WOWEXEC in the title bar.
If you select End Task again, the shutdown will never complete, and at this
point your computer is unusable:
- CTRL+ALT+DEL has no effect.
- CTRL+ESC has no effect.
- ALT+TAB task switching still works, but is not useful.
The choices available with ALT+TAB at this stage will probably be limited
to the bad application and Program Manager. The bad application is still
hanging. If you attempt to run other applications from Program Manager,
they may fail to start with or without reporting errors. The following
errors may appear:
DLL INITIALIZATION FAILED
D:\winnt35\system32\comctl32.dll failed
The process is terminating abnormally.
DLL INITIALIZATION FAILED
D:\winnt35\system32\kernel32.dll failed
The process is terminating abnormally.
At this stage it is necessary to turn off your computer.