Freelancer - Won't shut down

[Hero01]

This is my first post, please excuse the crudity of the message.
I have an eMachines 2.7Ghz 512Mb RAM 80 Gig hard drive running a GeForce 5200 grapics card and on board sound.

I have sorted out my sound problems with the codec pack, but my main problem is that when I shut the game down from the game menu, (by the way I'm using XP Home), the game seems to hang the computer. Pressing CTRL,ALT,DEL (even several minutes after aborting the game), tells me that the game is running at 99% under the CPU tab. I have also disabled all of the settings under the 'services' from the 'run program' tab under the START menu according to "blackviper.com" , but this doesn't seem to have any effect on the program. Even pressing "End process" seems to have no effect. I've run AVG,(which I update every 2-3 days), and checked for spyware, but to no avail.
Can someone please shed any light on my predicament???