Windows Server – Disabling ‘Reason for Shutdown’ Dialog in Windows 2003/2008

You could try turning on verbose Group Policy logging. Create the registry key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Diagnostics

Underneath that key, create a REG_DWORD value named RunDiagnosticLoggingGlobal and set the value to 1.

That will enable verbose group policy logging to the Application Event Log.

The only timeout that Group Policy has that I'm aware of is the timeout for script execution. My gut would've said this was a shutdown script problem, but since you indicate there are no shutdown scripts being applied I guess I'd have to write that guess off.

You say "...that should be applied..." in reference to the shutdown scripts. Have you run an RSoP to be sure? Unless you're the only person managing the GPOs I don't know that I'd trust things to be left as you expect them.

How long is the hang, anyway? The default script timeout is 10 minutes. If you're seeing an exactly 10 minute hang then I'd be double and triple-checking that a shutdown script hasn't gotten assigned. To change that timeout, have a look at the "Maximum wait time for Group Policy scripts" setting in the "Scripts" sub-node of the "System" node of "Administrative Templates" in Group Policy.

Open eventvwr → System.

View → Filter... → Event Id: 1074 and 1076. Comment field will contain what you typed in.

If there are no other events around that time to give you any clues, you may want to adjust your auditing settings to catch more items, but Sean Earp's link will probably give better details on that.