I love using truecrypt. I Kept it simple and don't use the system feature but stick to non hidden partitions. I use windows 7 and have not upgraded mostly because of how much I like using truecrypt. I can't figure out what is still running on truecrypt when I try to shut down. I don't let my system sleep or hibernate and close all my documents and folder lists and it still says a process is still using truecrypt. Am I being paranoid that Microsoft has put something in the operating system to track truecrypt files? by the way, sometimes it does shut down fine.
When you open TC, a process begins to run. This process remains active after you close TC. Sometimes it can prevent Windows from shutdown, and a forced shutdown may be necessary, but this is not frequent in my experience. Also, if I mount and later dismount a TC volume that is in an external USB disk, I am unable to "safely remove" the disk, I have to reboot to remove it.