Woody and I write books together (Special Edition Using Microsoft Office 2003 and Special Edition Using Microsoft Office XP, for instance), but because we live on opposite sides of the earth, we rarely see each other in person. So it was a real surprise and treat when I discovered that Woody and his family were in Redmond last week and we had a chance to have dinner together.
Woody’s doing well. He lives in Phuket, Thailand, which was devastated by the tsunami but is swiftly being rebuilt. And he’s got a new Web site. Go say hi at Ask Woody. (And tell him he needs an RSS feed!)
Ed Bott 
Some time ago Woody showed how to create a shortcut that would shut down the pc without all the normal steps. Unfortunately it only works when the person is logged into XP as and Administrator as MS has restricted use of the shutdown command for some reason.
Is there any workaround???
To shut down the PC, you need to have administrator privileges. That’s just a fundamental security issue.
You might be able to work around it by using the runas command in the shortcut and passing your admin credentials to the shutdown command.