How many times have you executed the shutdown sequence for your machine and left the office (or house) only to find it's still running when you return? And then there's that "friendly" warning dialog box displayed telling you to close all open applications so that XP can be shutdown?

This happened to us all the time, but no longer, thanks to the following hack:

Go to Start > Run > type "regedit". Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop, Modify the "AutoEndTasks" key to have a value of "1". If the key doesn't exist, simply create a new DWORD with the same name and a value of 1. To disable this hack, simply change the value back to "0", or delete the key entirely.