Is something wrong when the force close screen shows as empty when shutting down Windows 7?

Question

Whenever you attempt to shut down, log off or restart windows 7 and there are some applications still working and windows can not close them nicely, Windows 7 will show a black screen that asks you if it should force close these applications before shutting down/restart. Now this is nice feature and it saves you from accidentally closing documents before saving them if you pressed the power button by mistake...

My problem is: I have this screen every time I try to shutdown/restart windows, but the open application list is empty. How come? why would windows asks me if I want to force close some application while it shows me an empty list? I feel something not right here. Could it be a bot something that is hiding itself so windows does not get its name but for some reason windows senses that there are some open application??

Is this normal behavior (bug?)? or I have something wrong going on?

I have Norton AV, Spybot, Malwarebyte, EMET.. all of them reporting nothing suspicious.

Answer 1

This usually happens when there is a process running, but isn't associated with a 'Window'. This is of course, from my experience and I don't know if it is documented anywhere. There are times this may be because of a malware, but I've seen some safe, but not-so-well-written applications exhibit this behavior. So if your AVs do not report anything, you are probably safe.

Answer 2

You could try to look at processes running on your machine to see what is keeping it open. It is probably worth investigating. It is fairly unlikely that it is a virus, but if something is consistently not responding to shutdown requests in a timely manner, it is indicative of either some computer problem or a poorly written service. This also might be a question better suited to superuser.