When a program hangs, you terminate it by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del, selecting the application in the "Close Program" box and clicking the "End Task" button. The problem is, Windows can take a long time to acknowledge that the program is not responding. There's a Registry modification you can use to speed up the process.
Run REGEDIT.EXE and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop. Right-click in the right-hand pane, choose New | String value and name the value HungAppTimeout. Double-click on the new value and set its data to 1000 (the default setting is 5,000 milliseconds).
If a program hangs, Windows can take even longer at shutdown to decide that there's a problem and prompt you to end the task. Create another string value named WaitToKillAppTimeout and set its value to 1000 (the default setting is 20,000 milliseconds). Try different values to see what works best!
Naturally, if the two values mentioned here already exist, you'll modify them, not create them. Absolutely do not set these values lower, than 1,000 milliseconds! We suggest that you start with half the defaults ( 2500 for HungAppTimeout and 10000 for WaitToKillAppTimeout ).
When Windows asks what to do about a hung application at shutdown, most of us just click "End Task". If you want to automate that process, create one more string value within the Registry key mentioned above. Name it AutoEndTasks and set its data to 1. Now Windows will automatically terminate a hung program detected at shutdown.
For more information on these settings see the Microsoft Technet article at http://www.microsoft.net/technet/win2000/systeman.asp!