Originally posted by maachan
When I stop the services to shutdown the database I see the message
Shutting down instance (immediate)
in the ALERT.LOG,
That check is exactly what I had in mind. In your case your service has indeed been set to shutd down the database in immediate mode. I belive this actualy is the default setting, but you can change this using instance manager (ORADIM) or manualy changing the registry keys.