14 DAY TRIAL // Windows 7 has been a remarkably polished operating system even as early as Beta Build 7000 and Release Candidate Build 7100 development milestones. But even after the platform was released to manufacturing, Microsoft confirmed that there were additional rough corners to be softened, and that it would do so with what the company referred to as future releases. This is the case of incorrect shutdown reason codes that are written to System Event Log (SEL) in scenarios involving user-initiated shutdown actions from computers running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. “The System Event Log is the database of events in the baseboard management controller (BMC) hardware. The SEL adapter conveys these events to the operating system,” the company noted.
“Microsoft will address the problem in future releases,” reads the message from the Redmond company associated with the erroneous shutdown reason codes in SEL. No word from the software giant on what “future releases” means, but chances are that the company is pointing to the first service pack for Windows 7. Microsoft traditionally delivers SP1 for Windows releases approximately one year after the general availability deadline. In this regard, Windows 7 users should expect SP1 by the end of 2010, or early in 2011 at the latest.
One of the Windows 7 issues that will be resolved in future releases is related to Event 0x000500FF (System Failure), which is written to SEL. The Redmond company informed that the event was logged even if the user who shut down the computer offered an entirely different shutdown reason.
“After reboot from a manual shutdown (START->Shutdown) the Windows System Eventlog shows two events 1074. The first entry contains the correct reason code provided by the user, the second looks similar to this: Log Name: System; Source: USER32; Date: 7/29/2009 12:00:26 PM; Event ID: 1074; Task Category: None; Level: Information; Keywords: Classic; User: Computername\Administrator; Computer: Computername; Description: The process C:\Windows\system32\winlogon.exe (Computername) has initiated the power off of computer Computernameon behalf of user Computername\Administrator for the following reason: No title for this reason could be found. Reason Code: 0x500ff. Shutdown Type: power off,” Microsoft explained.
While a fix will only be introduced with the future releases of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft does provide a workaround: “Use shutdown.exe to initiate the shutdown. E.g. from the elevated command line run: shutdown.exe /r /d P:4:2. This will result in an eventlog and SEL entry with reason code 0x80040002.”