Very slow shutdowns of Windows 8 guest

[iLikeMoney]

Maybe two months ago I built some templates for Windows 8 on Workstation 9 and set them up with ESX compatibility so they could be deployed on vSphere 5.1.  Well we just upgraded to 5.1 and I'm getting my first chance to deploy these OVFs on vSphere.  I'm seeing a couple of performance issues with these guests, first thing, the shutdowns take several minutes, is anyone else seeing this, is it a bug with Windows 8? misery would love company here.  The other thing I'm seeing is when trying get the latest Windows updates, to even navigate to the Windows update UI where you can click the button to check for updates there's a huge hang time of sometimes several minutes, i have no clue what this is from either, I'm trying to figure out if these are strange issues with my templates or if others see this too. On Win8 try right-clicking My Computer>Properties> Control Panel home>System and Security> click Windows Update> at this point for me the hourglass spins and spins, there's no change for literally like five minutes. Then finally the UI will present you with the button to check for updates which you can click and wait for yet more minutes but this latter wait is at least expected behavior.

We're also seeing the same problem when hosting on Workstation, so it's not a vSphere / ESXi thing. Aside from those annoyances the performance of the Windows 8 OS seems to be fine, they aren't slow with everything just these few oddities. Never had these issues with Windows 7 VMs. 

[iLikeMoney]

Discovered it's something to do with the proxy.

Found this on google:

Run command prompt (admin)

Netsh

Winhttp

Import proxy source=ie

These commands seemed to have cleared up both the windows update hang as well as the slow shutdown.  No idea why this is necessary with respect to windows update and not other services, especially when the machine has internet access and is able to auto activate over the internet.

Anyway, hope this helps someone.

[matzeetc]

It helped me alot. thx.

I was looking for that exact solution. I have no idea why this is needed for a clean OS installation but hopefully this is the last showstopper for building Windows 8 templates.

what proxy are you using?

again thx 4 your help.

[iLikeMoney]

Ran into that problem using our corp proxy.  Shutdowns are now fine but I'm still seeing issues intermittently with windows update -- like yesterday I had a Server 2012 guest where windows update kept failing on me.  Nothing seemed to fix that until I went in and lowered Trusted Sites (where all of the windows update URLs are bucketed) from Medium to Medium-Low then it found 15 or so updates right away. Just one of several nagging issues with these new OSs.