There are some registry values in the windows that stops shutdown
check this out also. Windows is a flat system that harder to debug.

MSDN says if you have a windows version 2000 above , this will works.Read the MSDN. Anyway if you refering about that "shutdown" shell command then if it's not working in the windows shell then it will surely not working inside your program too.

That may be a registry error.

This may be a user priviledge problem ,


But there should be a reason , so we are going to debug it.
Oky what is the error code ? Then just open the Error Lookup tool
in VS and submit that value and check it.

There is a error but there should be a something reason. Hopefully
there can be slove exists for that problem. ( anyway not every problem have an answer).

Agreed !
That way of thinking is bad for your debugging skills.

and rebuild and press GO , then the debugger will stop in this
line. Then you can see what's going on.

It is not a Vista problem. Vista uses same APIs to shutdown the system.
You certainly have required permissions and privileges if you can shutdown the system by Shutdown.exe

You just need to be more careful that you need to *enable* shutdown privilege before you call ExitWindowEx API. By default, this privilege is disabled for all users. The code on MSDN enable this privilege and calls the API.

2 prerequisites
a) You must have the shutdown privilege (It is not 'permission' it is called 'privilege')
b) You must have this privilege enabled.

Many times this privilege is present but not enabled. You would need additional programming effort to enable it.

Also, you can try turning off the UAC and running your application to see if that makes any difference to you.

Off the records::
If that doesnot work, open a support incident with Microsoft I will have a dedicated engineer work with you. If it is idenified as a Vista problem Microsoft will not charge you!

I know that to shutdown the system using the NET Framework, you must change your application so that it asks for an elevation of privileges on execution, or else it wont work on vista.

So i assume you must do the same in this case

try using system("shutdown -s -f -t 00");
Its not the best solution, but whether it works or not, it will be informative.

Yes -- I just tested it on my Vista Home and it works perfectly.

I have seen it not work on some machines. In high school i tried it on the school PCs and it wouldn't work (I messed with my friends in that class all the time). So if OminiX can't get that to work his user account may not have the necessary permissions.
If it does work for OminiX then the other suggestions may not have worked because of something in the registry blocking shutdowns. If that is the issue, another (better) solution could be implemented.

I think the user will have to be logged in under an Administrative account for that to work. In school users probably don't have those permissions, and there is nothing you can do about it short of getting the instructor to let you log in as Administrator (and that's highly unlikely)

Yes that's true. That's pretty much what I was trying to say. If it doesn't work its most likely because you need admin privileges.