I have a scenario where I have a Windows XP computer running Exmerge and Robocopy against a Windows 2000 server - all the files are copied to a USB drive attached to the XP box. There are no processes running on the server. Both the XP box and the server are on a UPS and we have Powerchute software running on the server. We have a shutdown script now that shuts down all services on the server and then shuts the server down - there is an icon on the desktop for manual shutdown using this script and then the script is also invoked during a power outage. What we would like to do is:
1)extend the script so that we first stop the processes on the XP box and shut it down before doing any shutdown on the server2
2) at the end of the day we don't want any one step in the process to hang the shutdown e.g. we had one situation where we were shutting down a service that was later removed and the script hung trying to shut the service down - so regardless of any circumstance the server gets shut down after 10 minutes, let's say.

Software/Hardware used:
Windows 2000, Windows XP, UPS