I ran only the cleaner portion of ccleaner, not registry, on my XP on a 2003 Dell Inspiron 1100. Over 1,000 items were removed, mostly cookies and tmp files.
I can't shut Windows down. "Start-Restart" and "Start-Turn Off" have no effect; there is no error message, the "Standby Turn Off Restart" window goes off and the system keeps running. Standby does work.
The system still seems to run slowly. I opened the "Add-Remove" window to uninstall some programs and it took over 10 minutes for the window to be populated with the list of programs on the computer.
Once you get over laughing at the age of my laptop, I'd appreciate your help in understanding what went wrong and how to fix it. I am way too freaked to try running the registry fix. Thanks.
It could be a background running process that's preventing it, or a recently installed program, or something else, however since we aren't sitting in front of your laptop it's hard to say for sure.
Many Windows XP systems can suffer from a user profile hive issue which is very easily solved with a freeware utility from Microsoft called User Profile Hive Cleanup Service. I don't know for sure if that's your issue or not, but possibly and it doesn't hurt to have it installed and to leave it installed.
If you look at your 'Administrative Tools->Event Viewer' logs it will show logged issues about your user profile hive having issues, and other issues on your system and is a good way to start troubleshooting the cause. Then again your system could need an official BIOS update from Dell to solve issues, etc.