The research on a class of asymptotic exit-time problems with a vanishing Lagrangian, begun in [M. Motta and C. Sartori, Nonlinear Differ. Equ. Appl. Springer (2014).] for the compact control case, is extended here to the case of unbounded controls and data, including both coercive and non-coercive problems. We give sufficient conditions to have a well-posed notion of generalized control problem and obtain regularity, characterization and approximation results for the value function of the problem.