I've tried bb4win and Litestep, and every time I need to log out for some reason (shutdown and all included), the system hangs and the spinning icon next to the "Logging out" text stops spinning. Changing the shell in registry for both local machine and current user causes this behavior.

Any ideas on what might cause this?

Alternatvely, what steps can I take to figure out what is going wrong? In Linux, you are able to open things in a framebuffer and examine the output, but with Windows it is not so clear to me how to see what is happening under the hood, especially with this Home Premuim version.

Update:

Since logging out normally to switch the shell back to Explorer doesn't work normally, I have to end Litestep first. However, when I do so, an Explorer navigation window pops up (not the taskbar). This also occurs with bb4win.