My computer has a mind of its own - Strange problem

[Goatweed]

Maybe she should try a System Restore in case a driver for the power was overwritten

That's what I was gonna say, and it's assuming that she has System Restore enabled (I think it is by default) - but she still would have had to create a restore point to do that though.

I remember win98 having shutdown problems, but not XP - then again, XP Home is kinda crappy, so it could be a known issue. Do you run Windows Update manually, or do you let it notify you? The difference is the notificatiuons are for critical updates ONLY - meaning there might be a patch to resolve this on the WU page, but it's not deemed critical. If you don't do it manually, try that forst (Start----Windows Update). And with cable, the updates should move really fast.

Funny, my mom has XP Home and I have XP Pro - neither of which tells me "it is now safe to shutdown your computer" - I thought they did away with that feature?