whilst there are many registry "hacks" that can be used to reduce both shut down and startup process, these are not good ideas. I believe the best way to reduce both shutdown and startup is by first of all checking the services that automatically startup and changing these to manual. comparing windows to linux in the startup/shutdown process whilst a bit unfair considering the amount of services started in the linux process prior to gui loading is a good example of how quickly indeed windows does boot. windows xp in particular does a fantastic job at boot time - l don't think it can really be betten. having said this perhaps your particular system does have an issue. did you system always start/shutdown slowly ?