VMware stuck in shutting down Windows XP

"My XP guest often hangs (or stalls, but I get impatient) before shutting down until I manually kill the batch file I leave running (it loops every 3 sec to watch for Windows commands from the OS-X host). This is true of XP generally, not necessarily running as a VM, though it may be a little quicker as the native OS than as a VM, to kill off tasks that ignore its polite requests.
Is anything running persistently in your XP guest?"