Boot Camp Windows 7 fails to restart/shut down properly

Hey everyone,

I'm having a huge issue right now with Boot Camp. I don't know what the root of my problem is or what is influencing it, but I'm at the end of my patience because I've already removed AND repartitioned my 15'' MacBook Pro Retina's hard drive more than 3 times using the Boot Camp Assistant to install Windows 7 Professional.

So this is my scenario in a nutshell...after partitioning my drive and installing Windows 7 Professional using Boot Camp, I boot into Windows and am installing all the software and updates that I want so that I can have a clean Windows image than I can work and restore from (using Winclone 3) in the event I have to migrate or reinstall my entire Mac OS X operating system. Hopefully what I'm trying to do sounds very simple.

My problem...after a certain point of installing a ridiculous amount of Windows updates (or a certain 3rd party software maybe), when I select to restart or shut down WIndows, it will go to the pre-shut down/restart screen (you know, the Windows login screen), do all its prelimary stuff, show the "Shutting Down" status and then IT WILL NOT SHUT DOWN! It will just stay on that screen forever! I verified this because I left it on overnight and when I awoke the next morning, it was STILL there!

Does anyone have any ideas?! I'm going crazy because I reinstalled Windows like 3 friggin' times and it takes a LONG time (as you know) to get and update everything. Sorry if I said any mean words, but I am very frustrated and out of patience for this.

Thank you guys for any input/help with this.

P.S. After creating a Boot Camp partition and installing Windows, should I be seeing the Windows partition as a startup disk candidate on the Startup Disk list under System Preferences on OS X?