Recently discovered, working with Autodesk support, what was causing Maya 2014/2015 to take an additional 30 seconds to shutdown when running on our closed network (no internet access) and wanted to share, in case anyone else is experiencing this issue.
The issue is that the Autodesk Customer Involvement Program (CIP) invokes a TCP connection to Amazon web services (AWS) during Maya shutdown that does not time out quickly if there is no internet access. This behavior needs to be disabled with an env var since disabling CIP in the Maya Help menu does not (I logged a support ticket with Autodesk about this and they are looking into it).
To disable CIP, add this line to your maya.env:
MAYA_DISABLE_CIP=1
Additionally the Customer Error Reporting (CER) can also be disabled. This does not exhibit the same behavior, but since we have a closed network data will never get out anyway.
MAYA_DISABLE_CER=1
This behavior can be observed in ProcMon (love this program!) in the form of:
10:48:47.3768889 AM maya.exe 2944 Thread Create SUCCESS Thread ID: 3280
10:48:50.3769098 AM maya.exe 2944 TCP Reconnect <machineNameOmitted> -> ec2-50-18-62-118.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:http SUCCESS Length: 0, seqnum: 0, connid: 0
10:48:56.3771721 AM maya.exe 2944 TCP Reconnect <machineNameOmitted> -> ec2-50-18-62-118.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:http SUCCESS Length: 0, seqnum: 0, connid: 0
10:49:04.2095958 AM maya.exe 2944 Thread Create SUCCESS Thread ID: 2260
10:49:11.3828316 AM maya.exe 2944 TCP Reconnect <machineNameOmitted> -> ec2-184-169-129-189.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:http SUCCESS Length: 0, seqnum: 0, connid: 0
10:49:17.3642937 AM maya.exe 2944 CreateFile <filenameOmitted> SUCCESS Desired Access: Read Attributes, Disposition: Open, Options: Open Reparse Point, Attributes: n/a, ShareMode: Read, Write, Delete, AllocationSize: n/a, OpenResult: Opened