we are using several installations of outlook 2003 SP2 and and the latest avast 4 add in.
having this add in activated, i’m able to shutdown down GUI using file → close but the tasks will stay active.
disabling avast plugin: outlook shutdowns fine.
This is indeed quite a strange problem; it would be useful to create a dump of the outlook.exe process (at the time it should have shut down). Maybe avast is blocking one of its threads, which prevents clean shutdown.
To create the dump, download and run http://public.avast.com/~vlk/hangrep.exe . In the list of processes select Outlook.exe and use the Save button. This generates a file which you can either send to my email address (if it’s smaller than e.g. 1 MB, ZIPed), or upload to ftp://ftp.avast.com/incoming .