Cannot capture image of Azure VM

Cannot capture image of Azure VM

I think the official Azure instructions on how to capture a VM image must
be either incorrect or incomplete. I've run a variety of tests myself
(detailed below) and more than two dozen people have complained on the
page that the instructions don't work and/or damage their VM's. Surely
something is missing from the instructions because people must be able to
capture images from Azure VM's.
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/windows/how-to-guides/capture-an-image/
The instructions on the page are pretty simple:
Remote Desktop into your Azure VM
Open an administrator command window
Run sysprep with the indicated settings (Out-Of-Box-Experience,
Generalize, Shutdown)
Hit OK
Wait for the system to shut the VM down
Click capture in the portal.
It sounds simple but the VM never actually shuts down so you can't
actually click the capure button. If you manually shutdown the instance,
even after waiting many hours, the resulting image fails to work and the
original vhd is destroyed in the process.
Can anyone confirm you are able to capture a running Azure instance using
either this workflow or some other workflow? If so, can you tell me what
you're doing differently from what I'm doing?
Details - The tests I've run are as follows:
TEST 1 - Win2k8 R2 on Small instance
Launch a small instance of Win2k8 R2 in the US West region
Remote desktop into the image
Run sysprep with OOBE,generalize,shutdown
Azure dashboard shows all CPU activity completed after 15min of sysprep,
device is idle, steady state is 0.41% cpu
Wait several hours (>2.5 hours as of this writing on this instance, >12
hours on other tests)
Azure VM is still running, capture button for the instance is unavailable
in portal
TEST 2 - Win2k8 R2 on Large instance
same steps as Test 1 but on Large instance
same results except steady state CPU utilization is 0.08% after 15 minutes
TEST 3 - Win2k12 Data Center Edition on small instance
same steps as Test 1 but run Win2k12 Data Center
same result as Test 1 except steady state CPU utilization is 4.2%
TEST 4 - Win2k8 R2 on Small instance with Windows update
same steps as Test 1 but run Windows Update repeatedly until no more
updates available before running sysprep
same results as Test 1
TEST 5 - Win2k8 R2 on Small instance with Visual Studio 2012 Update 3
same steps as Test 1 but install VS2012 Ultimate and VS2012 Update 3
before running sysprep
same results as Test 1
TEST 6 - Win2k8 R2 on Large instance with fully configured IIS server
provision our standard server configuation (IIS, .NET 4.5) on a large
instance
run our standard web service tests
run sysprep with OOBE,generalize,shutdown
wait 4 hours, allowing sysprep to run
use portal to shutdown instance
use portal to capture instance
generated image doesn't work (provisioning machines with it times out
after a couple hours)
original VHD doesn't work (can't remote desktop into instance created with
the VHD)
TEST 7 - Win2k8 R2 on Large instance with fully configured IIS server
same as test 6 except wait 12 hours allowing sysprep to run
as of this writing (12+ hours) the VM still hasn't shut down