I recently upgraded to Windows Vista. One of the bad points I noted was that it crashed during shutdown. At the time I put the blame on ATI's video drivers for my Radeon 9800 Pro.
It seems my instincts were correct. It did however take a few driver releases for them to fix the problem. I installed the new 7.4 drivers last night and the shutdown crash has completely disappeared. Hooray!!!
Congrats, now that Vista actually runs properly, you now have a crippled PC! :)
You're requesting a crash-less shutdown, cancel or allow?
All I can say is it works for me, and is in fact a bit quicker than it used to be (probably due to the GPU taking a lot of the load drawing the desktop).
Should have used Linux with Beryl. It's been around for ages, works really well, and doesn't come at a premium :)
I'm planning on installing Linux on another drive at some point anyway (it calls my inner geek).