PC won't shutdown after running steam

[***** Muppet]

My PC (windows 7 Prem) hangs during shutdown ONLY if I have run a game (steam has autorun in background to control game) This happened after last time steam forced an update when I connected. I have to do a soft reboot to start windows and then shut down again the PC. If a game has not ran (steam has not been woken) there is no problem and all is normal. I have tried shutting steam down via Task Manager but this doesn't work.
Any clues or .ini tweaks to fix this? most welcome.

[chiefputsilao✖️ping]

your pc specs?
(cpu, gpu, memory, storage, antivirus, win7 home premium x64?, etc)

maybe after running a steam game, the steam client is still synching data with the cloud server.

i am using windows 8.1 pro x64, intel i3-530, nvidia 9800gt 1gb ddr3 gpu, 4gb ddr3-1600 @1333 speed, 1tb hdd sata1.
i was always prompted by windows to force close steam and origin whenever i shutdown the computer.
if i don't do anything, windows will close the said programs albeit at more time.

[_I_]

steam sometimes takes a while to close
solution, exit steam before shutting down

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Are u manually exiting Steam Client first before shutting down?
U should always do that.

[Infectious]

I'm having this problem. You got it solved?

[Blkandwhtlion]

Same issue on my Windows 8.1 System. If I leave the Steam client running when I hit shut down the computer will go through the shutdown process and screen goes black, only the tower still runs the fans, lights, harddrive, etc. Right clicking the Steam client's icon and exiting before shutting down fixes this problem. Is there a better way than doing this because I forget to do this often, and having to kill power to my machine is potentially hurting drive sectors which lowers the life expectancy on my machine.

[Bierkiste]

Hi guys,

Same problem here. Running windows 10. Pretty new and clean machine.
It ONLY happens after playing a game. Running the client only is not an issue.

It happens to me with and without manually closing the client after the playing session.

Anyone has an advice ?

Funny side note: I even get an error in the event monitor "DistributedCOM" 10016 once I
start the steam client. I have NO idea what that is or if that issue is connected to the other one.

[thegodofcreation]

Ok, I am a software engineer myself. I think I found the answer:

After quitting PalWorld and / or Steam, don't let it stay for too long.
We may think before: after quitting PalWorld, let the computer do its things: save any file, transfer anything to the server, so let's wait for a few minutes or even 10 or 20 minutes.

Likewise, the same before quitting Steam.

And I found that, if I choose "exit to start screen" in PalWorld, then in a few seconds, click quit, and within a few seconds, click quit on Steam (for 2 windows: one main and one ad).
And then choose Windows: Restart, and it will restart smoothly.

So what I suspect is, if you let the computer do its stuff, it may create errors, or go into an infinite loop or something, so that's why if you wait for quite a while, then your shut down will fail.

If you do want to let the system save all files, then inside the game, just let your character stay idle doing nothing for a few minutes or 10 minutes, so that everything is saved.

[Pscht]

A software engineer who can't read post dates?

[Garry]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.