Automatically Close Programs at Shutdown

When you shut down Windows, if you have any programs running you'll get a message box warning you that a program is still running. You then have to close the program and tell XP again to shut down. It's a fairly pointless warning—better yet would be if XP automatically killed the programs without issuing the warning. That way, you wouldn't get error messages and wouldn't have to close each individual application before shutting down your computer.

To have XP automatically close programs at shutdown, run the Registry Editor and go to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop.

Edit the AutoEndTasks key so that is has a value of 1.

If the key doesn't exist, create it as a DWORD value and give it the value of 1. To disable it, either delete the key, or set the value to 0.

This trick will be very useful if you click shutdown and run away. It happened for of many times, I clicked shutdown and went away and when I came back my computer was still on, waiting to end the task.