How to Fix This App is Preventing Shutdown Windows 10 Issue

Want to disable This app is preventing shutdown or restart message in Windows 10 PC? Learn how to fix This app is preventing shutdown Windows 10 issue.

Have you ever come across a notification “This app is preventing shutdown” or “This app is preventing you from restarting or signing out” on your Windows 10 computer?

If yes then you are at the right place as today we are going to tell you how you can easily get rid of this error and Shut down or restart your Windows 10 computer easily without any notification.

Actually, it happens when you try to Shut down or restart your computer but there are few applications which aren’t closed then it might prevent you from shutting down or restarting your system and might even throw messages like:

Closing apps and shutting down or restarting or signing out
To go back and save your work, click Cancel and finish what you need to.

Running app name
This app is preventing shutdown or This app is preventing you from restarting or This app is preventing you from signing out.

The reason that you are getting this notification is that Windows operating system waits for each process to finish before shut down completely.

In case the process is not finished, the system will try to kill all the running processes.

By default Windows operating system waits for around 5 seconds for each process to finish and in this interval of 5 seconds if any process is not killed then you will get notifications such as This app is preventing shutdown or restart etc.

this app is preventing shutdown

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To get rid of this warning message and shut down your Windows 10 PC, either you have to Cancel and save whatever you were doing or just click on the Shut down anyway button to proceed.

By selecting Shut down anyway option, you are forcing Windows operating system to kill all the running processes. And with the Cancel option, you are just canceling the shutdown process and then you have to manually close all the processes which are running on your system.

This App is Preventing Shutdown Windows 10 Fix

If you want to get rid of the shutdown prevention or restart prevention notification each time you are trying to turn off or restart your Windows 10 computer then you can follow the steps which we have mentioned below.

Attention Please: Making changes to the Windows Registry files is a bit risky thing as one change might mess up with the proper functioning of your system. So, we suggest you create a system restore point on Windows 10 PC before following this method. Having a System Restore recovery options will help you in restoring the computer to an earlier date if something goes wrong.

Here’s how to disable This app is preventing shutdown or restart message in Windows 10 PC:

Step (1): First of all, open Run dialog box by pressing the Windows + R keys together and then enter regedit in it and hit Enter key.

Step (2): Now in the left pane of Registry Editor, navigate to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop

this app is preventing shutdown windows 10

Step (3): Next in the right pane, right-click on the empty area and select New > DWORD (33-bit) Value and rename it to AutoEndTasks.

this app is preventing shutdown or restart

Step (4): Now double click on AutoEndTasks to open it and then set the Value data to 1 and click on OK button.

this app is preventing you from restarting

Step (5): Once you have made all these changes, now close the Registry Editor window and restart your computer for the changes to take effect.

Now you can try shutting down your Windows 10 computer with the opened applications or running processes and it shouldn’t throw this app is preventing shutdown Windows 10 error message.

This is the only quick method which will help you in getting rid of such warning messages and shutting down your system smoothly. You can try out this method on Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 computer too, it will work just fine.

We hope that now you are able to easily disable this app is preventing shutdown or restart notification in Windows 10 PC after following the above-mentioned steps.

If you are having any doubts regarding Windows 10 app preventing shutdown or if you are still getting the same notification like This app is preventing you from restarting or This app is preventing you from signing out or This app is preventing shutdown Windows 10 then do let us know using the comments section below.

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