Programs fail to exit

Hey, I am finding that many programs on my machine will not exit when asked. Either the window will close and the program still is running in the background, or the window will freeze/not respond. Most of the programs that crash are not all that demanding either.
I am running Vista Ultimate on this machine.
Athlon 3800+ X2 dual core
1.5gb DDR PC3200
Radeon x1550
Maxtor 80gb 7200rpm (boot drive)
250gb Sata (data drive)

Everything is stock speeds and programs are installed on the same drive as the OS. It is a fairly recent install of Vista, and have noticed this problem from the start.
I have tried installing some updates from Microsoft and updating video drivers.

Does anybody have any idea what could be causing these programs to not respond/still run in the background on exit??
Any ideas would be appreciated (other than bashing Vista), Thanks
:)

I have no idea about vista specific problems.

If this was XP my thoughts would be that if this is an issue with programs that use network connections it might be a firewall software issue related to closing connections.

Other than that a virus or other malware seems likely.

I do daily scans with Spybot S&D and Ad-Aware, and weekly defrag
I have tried setting my firewall to allow everything, to no avail.
I'm thinking maybe my boot drive is too slow? It is a 7200rpm with 8mb buffer and connected through IDE, but I may reinstall Vista onto my Sata drive instead.

Check your event viewer.

do a hijackthis test - download here http://www.majorgeeks.com/download3155.html
run your log through these analyzers
i suggest you use all of them and compare
http://www.hijackthis.de/
http://hjt.networktechs.com/
http://www.prevx.com/hijackthis.asp
http://exelib.com/hijack
http://www.spyandseek.com/

Installed any new programs lately ? I had a like problem with a software install it kept coming up new programs installed on a reboot and took forever to shut down . Cyberlink DVD was my problem but could be a corrupt file like a sound shut down event.


At first I thought it was my firewall as it hung for a good two minutes , I wanted to kill something . Just a thought tho .

Well I got it sorted out I think.
Probably overkill, but I got rid of all my partitions, did a format and clean install. Then installed the chipset drivers for vista32 from the motherboard website, as opposed to the ones that came on the cd.
So far so good.