BleepingComputer.com: Shutting Down Vista

My computer has trouble shutting down. I'm running Windows Vista Ultimate 32 bit. For about a month now, it'll get all the way to the shutting down screen, then stay there all night. It used to be that if I manually logged off first, it would then shut down, but now it no longer shuts down unless I turn it off in the back. My other problem, is that whenever I have a dropdown menu, whether it is in the address bar of Mozilla, or the location bar of a folder, it just keeps blinking a lot. Also I have noticed a large decrease in the speed of my machine. Please I need some help.

Is there an extensive amount of red x's in the reliability monitor? Its bundled with Administrative Tools in the Control Panel. This might help you pinpoint the problem.

My computer slowed down considerably when I installed Vista on it. I think Vista is just fundamentally flawed from the start.

hi,,, do you mean you installed a new os on an xp machine,,,, vista needs alot more RAM than xp to run smoothly,,, on xp 1gig was recomended although 512 & 256 would work but it would be a bit slow & not very responsive,,, the same applyes to vista,,, 2gig is recomended although it will run with 1gig or 512 but once again there will be a big differance in proformance,,,, also i read somewhere that vista like's a high end processor like the core2 or the 2.5 GHz & up processors to run smoothley, but i dont know about that one as my friend has a pentium4,, 2.00GHz but with 2gig of ram and all works ok.
good luck.