Re: you were on the right track, thanks

after reading what you said I started looking at the sound card and it looked to me as if windows or the bois was trying to assign an irq to the sound card but there was a line in the config.sys which was assigning a dos irq , I believe, anyway I went and bypassed the config.sys on load up and now it shuts down everytime.

it is strange that was the cause but ...go figure.

thanks