Wont shut down

I am still running W 2000. I installed Avast a few months ago and, I am very happy with the general performance. However, there is a problem. Since installation my computer will not switch off on its own. When I click ‘shut down’ it says ‘windows is shutting down’ and then it goes to a plain blue screen. I then have to shut the machine down by pressing and holding,the start button.
It starts up perfectly next time. Everything else works fine. The only difference that I have noticed is that, after clicking on 'shut down, it went through a procedure and said ‘windows is shutting down’ (still does this) and ‘Saving your settings’ - this it does not do anymore, but all settings seem to be fine on restart.
I have tried several ‘remedy’s’ as suggested on websites, and I have run several registry cleaning bits of software but the problem persists.

Any ideas? ??? Thanks M

I’ve had many similar issues on my XP SP3 machine with this version. Sometimes it gets to the “Saving Settings…” area and never gets passed it, others it sits on the icon-less, taskbar-less desktop image, and yet even other times it stays at the “Windows XP” screen that it normally flashes before the log-off process. I haven’t had any issues on my Win2k Pro machine, or my WinVista Ultimate machine yet though.

Trythis program from MS.