System reboots on Shutdown Issues?

My system of 3 years run flawlessly until my daughter (1 year old) discovered the power button to the PC which became her new play toy. Subsequently, repeated pressing of the on off button now resulted in the system spontaneously rebooting after its shutdown sequence. It does not do it all of the time but intermittently.

1) So far I have tried reinstalling windows XP from a known good backup. Did not fix the Problem.

2) Disabling the “restart on system failure” feature in Windows. System still rebooted.

3) After trying the above with no avail, I am thinking that this is some sort of deeper rooted evil. Maybe the case power/reset button is going bad. I tried disconnecting them from the MB during shut down. System Still Rebooted!

I am going to try and reset the system bios this evening and give that a shot. Anyone have other ideas at what might be causing the problem? Suggestions Please. Thanks.

When this probably usually happens, it's because of the wires connecting to the motherboard are on the wrong pins. Such as wires connected to the shutdown pins in the incorrect order, causing the electricity to be confused as a reboot instead of turning off.

If the reset and shutdown buttons were pressed constantly and hard enough, it's possible the wiring from these buttons themselves got damaged. That's all I can really think of.

I am not sure that is the problem. The system has been operating fine for 3 years as connected with the MB and I have already tried shutting down through windows with the power/reset wires from the case disconnected from the MB.

Yes, which is why I have no honest idea what is causing the problem if it is not a new computer. I was hoping to maybe get some more input from other people by starting a couple leads. Do you think it could be a power supply related issue? Maybe you don't know, maybe I'm just an idiot and I should delete my posts because I'm not helping!!! blah!

Pushing the power button is suppose to trigger the standard Windows shutdown sequence, so I don't think it would have messed anything up aside from the button itself. There's a couple of features you can try to disable and see if they help.

First under control panel->display->screen saver->power->advanced you can change the options for the power button and I think the sleep button to do nothing. That will at least stop your daughter from playing with her new toy. In your bios there may also be a setting for power button behavior that you might want to try resetting. Also there should be a setting called something like "action after power failure" or something similar that you can set to remain off.

Resetting your bios is probably a good idea, definitely shouldn't hurt anything as long as you can remember your settings. You should also check the battery voltage since a failing battery can sometimes cause erratic behavior.

I had this problem one time after a faulty driver update, have you updated any drivers recently?

Also, does this machine happen to have a PCI video card? (just a shot in the dark)