problem when shutting down

This just started happening a few days ago. Every time I shutdown it says that explorer.exe is not responding and it askes me if i want to end task or wait....but to shut down if i click end task it will just go back to the same thing so i have to wait till it checks everything i guess not sure what its doing but after it does that i have to click end task....I haven't installed anything. the only thing that i remeber doing is uninstalling hitman 2.

I assume you are using windows 98? That is something that anyone helping you (hopefully even me) will need to know.

oh sorry didn't realize that i didn't put my os. im using xp home

hmmm... I remember seeing this problem at work on a win 2k machine... could it be registry error?