I had a problem of every time I wanted to log off, restart, or shut down a particular computer, it was hanging for a long time and would eventually proceed after crashing a process. The pesky process that was holding it up was called: Cardreaderlookupwindow.
As if that wasn’t cryptic enough, the blame actually comes to Adobe Photo Downloader. You might have noticed a little camera icon with a green arrow next to it in your system tray. This is Adobe’s Photo Downloader that also causes the crashes to occur. For this instance, the program came with Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0.
The simplest way to prevent this hanging/crashing is to stop using the Adobe Photo Downloader. If you right-click on the icon in your system tray, you can disable it but it still stays there and it still causes the process crash at log out.
Since disabling the process does nothing, you have to actually tell Adobe to stop using it. If you open up Adobe Photoshop Elements (or which ever Adobe product it came with for you), you can find the setting in the preferences.
Go to Edit, Preferences -> Organize and Share.
This will open up a new window. Select ‘Camera or Card Reader’ from the left pane and then uncheck “Use Adobe Photo downloader to get photos from Camera or Card Reader.”
You may have to change another setting under ‘Sharing’ (either provide an e-mail address or switch it to download images to your hard drive), but then you can hit OK. After that, if you mouse over the camera icon in your system tray, it should go away if it hasn’t already. Like the icon, the hanging/crashing should also go away.