When shutting down the computer following a long session, an error message appears: ‘A fatal exception 0E has occurred at 017F:BFF9DFFF. The current application will be terminated’. The message then says press any key to continue or press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart the computer. However, these commands don’t always work and I often need to turn off the computer at the power point. The computer is running Windows 98.

Unfortunately these problems are very difficult to diagnose, due to the large number of possible causes. However, since the problem only occurs after a long session, the most likely scenario is some program or process running in the background and preventing Windows from shutting down properly (e.g. the process freezes when the computer is shutting down). So, our first procedure involves determining whether a background process is causing the problem. After using the computer for a long session and you suspect the problem may occur, press CTRL-ALT-DEL to show a list of running processes. End any non-essential processes which are running - generally the only two essential processes you should not close are ‘explorer’ and ’systray’. Once all the non-essential processes are closed, try shutting down Windows. If the shutdown completes successfully, it is likely one of the background processes is causing the problem and we now just need to find which one. One workaround would be using CTRL-ALT-DEL to close all the processes every time you wish to shutdown, but this could be quite inconvenient. So instead, you could try narrowing down the process by closing one process each time you shutdown the computer following a long session. If the issue occurs, the closed process is not causing the problem. If the issue does not occur, you may have found the problem process. This is a tedious and potentially inaccurate procedure, but possibly the only way to easily track down the problem process.

However, should a background process not be the cause of the issue, you should try disabling the Windows 98 fast shutdown option. When this option is enabled, Windows shuts down faster as the device drivers are not uninitalised. That said, this can cause problems during shutdown. For instructions on disabling fast shutdown, visit support.microsoft.com/kb/187607. Be aware, if your computer has been updated with the Windows 98 Second Edition Shutdown Patch (to resolve other shutdown issues) the option for Fast Shutdown will not be available.