On shutting down the computer a message appears that Google Toolbar Notifier is not responding, and I need to manually close the process by clicking the ‘End Now’ button. It is rather irritating having to wait and close this process, as opposed to simply pressing the Windows shut down button and allowing the computer to turn itself off. How can I stop this interruption in the shutdown process? The computer is running Windows XP.

The Google Toolbar Notifier is a component of the Google Toolbar, which can be installed in web browsers to allow the easy usage of Google services. The Google Toolbar Notifier ensures that the default search engine in the web browser is not changed without user consent. Other users have reported problems with the Google Toolbar Notifier, which seems to mostly be caused by bugs in older versions of Google Toolbar. The most common solution is to uninstall Google Toolbar and then download and install the latest version from the Google website. So, uninstall the Google Toolbar through the ‘Add or Remove Programs’ control panel in Windows XP. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Control Panel’ and open the ‘Add or Remove Programs’ control panel. Find the Google Toolbar in the list of installed applications, select the entry and click ‘Remove’.

Once the uninstall process has completed, restart the computer. Then, go to toolbar.google.com and download the latest version of the Google Toolbar. Install the newly downloaded copy of the toolbar, and hopefully the problem should no longer persist. Of course, if you no longer want the Google Toolbar installed on your computer there is no need to install the latest version after uninstalling the old version.

Should this not work, the next fix is to disable the setting in Google Toolbar which is titled ‘Search with Google’. This should stop the Google Toolbar Notifier process from loading, and thus you should no longer receive the error message on shutdown. To disable the ‘Search with Google’ feature, open the settings for the Google Toolbar and in the window that appears click the ‘More’ tab. Under the ‘Beyond the Search Box’ heading, disable (untick) ‘Search with Google’. Click OK. Restart the computer for the settings to take effect. Now, the Google Toolbar Notifier process should not load on startup and thus the error message on shutdown should no longer appear.