Unable to Select Shut Down or Restart

You go to shutdown your Windows XP computer only to find you’re not given the option. The only option available to you is log off. The same behavior is experienced when logged in as either a local or domain administrator. What’s up? Well, it could be that your local security settings are set (on purpose) to disallow this behavior. If you’re looking at this thinking, “Hey, I am the administrator and this isn’t what I wanted!” You might simply have a corrupt security policy. Run a gpupdate at the command prompt to download a new copy. If that’s no bueno, check our your local security settings (hint: secpol.msc) to make sure nothing funny is in there.

A network administrator at my work came across this issue and was denied access to change a “disallow” shutdown setting in local security settings even logged in as thedomain admin, local admin, safe mode, whatever. It turns out something in the local security settings had become corrupt and a gpupdate command didn’t do a thing. The final solution? A neat little command that resets the security settings to default. Why the network admin was able to do a reset and not change a setting, who knows, but I hope it can help you:

Note: This procedure may remove users from any local security groups, so be sure to take note of all the users in those groups.

1. At command prompt, run: secedit /configure /cfg %windir\repair\secsetup.inf /db /secsetup.sdb /verbose
2. Reboot computer

Local security settings should be reset default now and will download the correct settings from the domain.

(CC-licensed image by cosmocatalano)