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Alright, so I was at a friend's house, and two things were wrong with her laptop. Firstly, it doesn't shut down or reboot. Start>Turn off, etc, none of it works, not from the task manager, nothing. Windows doesn't react one bit to the commands, and she has to press the power button on the machine to turn it off -- which isn't good. Does anyone know what causes this, and any remedies?

Secondly, she upgraded from Firefox 1.0.6 to 1.5, and now Firefox doesn't connect to the internet. Uninstalled, reinstalled, and nothing. It's less than a year old, Sony VAIO laptop.

Any and all help is appreciated. I googled some stuff and all I found were conflicts with Roxio, which she doesn't have, and Windows 98 shutdown problems.

I think I read that the Firefox may be a firewall issue. Is that true, or is there another solution?

Many thanks in advance.

For the shutdown problem, boot the computer in safe mode. If you still have shutdown problems, then either there is a hardware fault, or you have a corrupt windows install.

About Firefox, check the connection settings. Tools->Options->Connection Settings.

The only time I have probs shutting down is when theres probs with closing the software running... I think some virus's and spywere could do this aswell... Is she running any software to prevent this??? Or any form of pc/laptop windoes checker??

She has Spybot Search and Destroy and Microsoft AntiSpyware as well as Norton Antivirus 2005... she's away on vacation now but I'll have her run scans with each when she gets back, though I think she's kept up with that.