When you sign out, restart or shut down your system, the apps you don’t have closed yet prevents the action from happening. This is due to the fact that system waits for each process, to have its own shutdown. Unfortunately, when the process fails to close themselves, then system forces to kill these processes. Generally, the time for which system waits to forcefully kill an specific task is around 5 seconds. Else, you receive following screen with message:
Closing <number of tasks> apps and shutting down
Page Contents
This app is preventing shut down.
To go back and save your work, click Cancel and finish what you need to.
[Shut down anyway] [Cancel]
![[FIX] This App Is Preventing Shutdown In Windows 8 Or Later](https://htse.kapilarya.com/FIX-This-App-Is-Preventing-Shutdown-In-Windows-8-Or-Later.png)
Here you can click Shut down anyway to support system in forcefully ending each task yet running. Or you can select Cancel button and go back to close each apps (tasks) manually and then sign out, restart or shut down your system. If an user faces this scenario when he is shutting down machine yet running a number of apps, then this situation is obvious.
Recommended : See this if you’re unable to access Task Manager
However, if you’re seeing The app is preventing shutdown message each time when you turn off your system, then it needs to be fixed. Here is how you can:
FIX : “This App Is Preventing Shutdown” In Windows 10/8.1/8
Registry Disclaimer: The further steps will involve registry manipulation. Making mistakes while manipulating registry could affect your system adversely. So be careful while editing registry entries and create a System Restore point first.
1. Press 
+ R and put regedit in Run dialog box to open Registry Editor (if you’re not familiar with Registry Editor, then click here). Click OK.
2. In the left pane of Registry Editor window, navigate here:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
![[FIX] This App Is Preventing Shutdown In Windows 8 Or Later](https://htse.kapilarya.com/FIX-This-App-Is-Preventing-Shutdown-In-Windows-8-Or-Later-1.png)
3. In the right pane of above shown window, right click and select New -> DWORD Value. Rename the newly created DWORD (REG_DWORD) as AutoEndTasks and double click on it to get this:
![[FIX] This App Is Preventing Shutdown In Windows 8 Or Later](https://htse.kapilarya.com/FIX-This-App-Is-Preventing-Shutdown-In-Windows-8-Or-Later-2.png)
4. Finally, in the Edit DWORD Value box shown above, change the Value data to 1. Click OK. You can now close the Registry Editor and reboot the machine to make changes effective.
Hope this helps!
Also read: Task Host Window Is Preventing Shut Down In Windows 10.
13 Comments
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Hi, I don’t have ‘AutoEndTasks’, I have the one above and below but not it.
^^ You can manually create the DWORD :)
Doesn’t work for me (Windows 10, Version 1511 (OS Build 10586.104)
For Windows 10 you need to configure it in Local Group Policy
^^ Either you do registry maniputation or configure a policy, that both does the same job :)
microsoft said is REG_SZ not reg_DWORD
technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc978604.aspx
c
I just want to have it end task on one particular program. If I happened to have something *valid* I want to know… Any way to have Windows automatically end task when shutting down for a particular application?
Thank you for the post!
However it actually does not resolve any problem! I still receive the message “This app is preventing shutdown” (for both shutdown and restart processes) without any information about the app. I’ve waited many seconds with the mouse above it trying to understand, which app the pc is talking about, without any success :(
If I remove this new Regedit Entry, the removal does not affect anything else, doesn’t it?
This works! I tried everything else – even the solutions presented by Microsoft and didn’t work. Thank you very much!!!!
^^ Glad we could help 😎
I have tried doing the above but to no avail, my computer still says “this app is preventing shutdown” with no indication of what app is doing this
HI , I HAVE DONE ALL THESE PROCESSES FOR CLEARING OUT MY PROBLEM BUT ITS NOT WORKING YET ,THOUGH I HAVE DONE ALL THE STEPE AS YOU HAVE MENTIONED ABOVE
SIR, KINDLY GIVE ME A SOLUTION ITS JUST SHOWING “THESE APPS ARE PREVENTING SHUTDOWN”
THERE ARE NOT SHOWING 1-2 APPS ITS SHOWING 59 APPS PREVENTING SHUTDOWN CAN YOU PLEASE SEND OR TELL ME AN SOLUTION FOR STOPING THESE APPS AND SHUTTING DOWN MY LAPTOP PROPERLY AND SECURLY , I DONT EVEN WHERE ARE THESE APPS BEING INSTALLED OR BEEN INSTALLING CAUSE THERE NO ICON IN THE TASK BAR , EVEN THERE’S NOTHING EVEN WHEN I’M BOOTING UP THE LAPTOP THERE IS JUST SOME FAST BLINKS WHENEVER I’M REFRESHING MY LAPTOP AND, WHENEVER I SHUTDOWN MY LAPTOP THIS MESSAGE APPEARS ABOUT PREVENTING SHUTDOWNS BY THOSE APPS , I DONT KNOW WHETHER THESE ARE APPS OR VIRUS IN MY LAPTOP
PLEASE PLEASE SHOW ME A WAY TO SORT OUT THIS SERIOUS PROBLEM
THANK YOU ,RESPECTIVELY
@SMIT CHAUHAN
Smit Chauhan, I don’t know if you resolved the problem, but to me it sounds like you only really have the nuke option. Your system is more compromised than Bill having his cigar chewed on by Monica.
Somehow malware got onto your computer and then downloaded a bunch of its friends. That’s why there’s like 50 “applications” preventing shutdown.
That is not normal. If you still have this issue, and you haven’t taken a flamethrower to your laptop, I advise you to take it to your local tech shop and request they zero it for you.
That just means everything on the computer has all its 1s set to zero. 1s and 0s being bits the smallest type of data on a computer. Binary. If everything is zero’d, no code, malicious or otherwise, would survive that. Unfortunately, it means you lose everything on your harddrive, but whatever you do, don’t do a backup of your data.
The malware will definitely be part of that backup and chances are, your antivirus not being able to pick it up and clean it means you won’t be able to while it is in the backup drive either. Just cut your losses if you don’t want something evil in your machine anymore.
Then ask the tech guys to reinstall everything. Just warn them of the malware, and it is scary-bad. Malware these days have some legendary types among their numbers. Their ability to infect, hide, be naughty, and pass on the evil like some sort of digital Samara is terrifying.
They must master-slave your laptop, and nuke it from there. THEN they must flash the BIOS. They have to flash the BIOS. Yes, you get BIOS viruses. Yes, they are as nasty as you’d expect. And they’re good at preventing you from doing a clean install. So zeroing and flashing the BIOS is the only way to be sure its gone. Actually, the only way to be sure is to destroy your laptop with fire. But that seems a bit extreme.
Then, once your tech guys have done that, they’ll just reinstall your operating software, presumably Windows, and all your drivers. Most likely, assuming you don’t pirate, your apps will be waiting for you to be downloaded from the original vendor you got them from.
Here are the most important rules to not being (most likely) infected with malware again. Keep to these rules and you have a good chance of not going through this again.
1) Never pirate. Anything. Games, movies, music, applications. Pirated versions of your favourite apps and games are a very easy vector for infection for hackers. Do not do this ever.
2) Peer to peer downloads. Don’t go to these sites. Don’t download peer to peer files. This is basically rule 1.
3) Don’t go to dodgy websites. This includes porn. Porn sites are notorious for malware just waiting to infect you via code injection. Stay on the straight and narrow. You catch all sorts of diseases in the red light district.
4) Never ever go onto the Dark Web. What’s a nice guy/gal/non-binary like you doing going to the Dark Web? Stepping foot in there will get your computer AIDs in a split second.
5) Make sure you have a decent anti-virus. Check out the review sites. Make sure they have internet protection. Also, make sure your firewall is on. But remember, anti-viruses don’t catch everything. In fact, cyber security is always one step behind the bad guys. Still, having anti-virus on your system is like wearing body armour. It’ll protect you a lot more than not having it on at all, but the high calibre stuff will still get through — which is why you have to keep to the other rules.
6) Don’t use your admin account. Set up a second account without admin privileges and use that almost all of the time you’re on your machine. You can just enter the admin password when you want to install stuff. This helps prevent malware making nilly-willy changes to your system if any gets on.
7) Did I mention not to pirate? Don’t pirate!
8) That includes NOT letting anyone, for any reason, insert their USB Drive into your computer at any time. This is very important. You don’t know where that USB has been. Your friend might not be keeping to the same computer security hygiene as you. Probably isn’t. So, don’t let them ever use your machine. If they want files off your computer, wetransfer it.
9) Be very careful opening files emailed to you. Even if it is from friends. Even if its supposedly a benign file like a jpeg. That can still unleash malware on your machine. PDFs, anything. Just find out what they want. If you have to open it up, scan it first, but only after you’ve updated the definitions in your anti-virus.
Those rules should help, but you never know, and that’s the problem. If you used peripherals with your laptop, they could possibly be infected too. Peripherals like gaming mice, RGB keyboards, bluetooth headphones. I recommend not using them with your laptop after you’ve zero’d it.
Good luck! It’s malware hell out there.