can someone explain the dissapearance of the option to shut down /restart..
it has actually vanished.. one day i went to press shut down and its was gone!
:nodding:

Are you a standard or admin user on your computer, and have you disabled the UAC (User Account Controls)?
I am an admin, the only user of the computer, and have disabled UAC.
This only happend last night, when I went to turn it off, i pressed what i thought was shut down, but that put the computer on hibernate last night, but now its time to fix the problem.
How long ago did you disable UAC?
Since i've had the PC. I think I may have deleted an entry in the registry for the 'shut down' and restart shortcut/functions. Can anyone enlighten me?
Okay, I've just made myself lose those functions
Do this:
Start, Run: regedit, Continue
Find: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer - then inside that delete "NoClose" should fix it, that is if it is even there, may not be... other than that I don't know what else to do..
If that doesn't work, try this: click start, right click start, click properties, start menu tab, click customize, advanced, scroll down the list and select display all system admisitrative tools on task bar. While other unwanted functions will appear, shut down should come back.
Usually this is set under the power settings. I think it is in the Screen Saver Control Panel still, I'm in XP at the moment...
Anyway, the different power settings will change which items appear by default. Minimal power will reveal "Shutdown". Mid-range will change the sleep to "Hibernate". Higher settings, such as "Always On" or (High Performance) may hide the non-sleep options.
Just create a Shortcut and add the Shutdown command. Any time you wish to shutdown simply launch the shortcut and it'll begin it's phase.