I have an HP All-in-One 200. I am putting this thread in the laptop section because that basically is what this cp is. It's mounted on a stand and doesn't have a battery but... it is just a big laptop.
I am running Windows 7 Home Premium, Ubuntu 10.04, and Ubuntu 10.10.
When I first installed the Linux O.S. I had no problems at all. But after a couple of updates, the computer freezes up on shut down. When I press the "Shutdown" or the "Restart" buttons, things appear to work normally. But then, while I have the purple background, and absolutely nothing else, the cp freezes. I then must press the On/Off button to get it to shut down.
Windows 7 shuts down normally, of course. I say, "of course" because it is an HP computer.

Oh, one other thing. When I open the terminal and issue the shutdown command, "#shutdown -h now", she closes right down with no fuss.

Which version of Linux are you specifically having shutdown problems with? You listed more than one.

Try logging out by using gnome-session-save.

Also check the config in your default.session to see what the restart command is.

Do you experience problems while logging out or just when you shutdown or restart?

Hi sag47, thanks for the reply.
Sorry, that was just plain dumb of me. I am having the problem only with 10.10.
Only with shutdown and restart.
This showed up as a bad link.
Followed this link and found this:
Checking in that location, I found no such file.
I opened each of them, but could not find a "default.session" file.

I updated the link for gnome-session-save. It was just a link to it's man page. In the future any command someone recommends to you, you can just type "man command" in the terminal to learn more about it.

Can you show me the contents of /usr/share/gnome/shutdown.

Also can you run the following command as root to see if any error output is shown.

Post the contents of shutdown.log. I don't expect to see much though since you said your shutdown command from the terminal worked.

Also you may want to look in /var/log/ folder for logs which could possibly contain errors with shutdown in them since dmesg is useless in this case.

First we've got to list all possible log files which may have shutdown errors in them.

Once you know which log files you need to look into then you need to grep each one of them to find out which lines the error occurrence shows up within each file. It is best to inspect the files individually. Lets call the file shutdown.err for this example.

Lets say that line 498 showed up in the results. You can use vim or the less pager to view the log at line 498 to see what caused the shutdown error.

Based on what error messages you see you can google around to hopefully find a concise accurate solution to your problem.

I reinstalled Ubuntu 10.04. I am having no problems there. Whatever is wrong with 10.10 they might straighten out soon. In the meantime, I have work to do, so the 10.04 reinstall was the best solution for me.
Thanks for the replies. When I have more time, I will try you suggestions.
Again, many thanks.

I think it is something with the kernel. I've had similar issues with different versions of recent kernels. I bet if you can compile your own kernel, the latest one, the problem will go away (it did for me).

Good idea. I am up to my butt in alligators right now, but I will give that a go as soon as I get some time off.
Thanks for the suggestion.

did you have any luck with that?
cause i have the same problems with reboot and shutdown and i have to manually restart or shutdown...

Can you boot to a live CD and search your logs for what is causing the kernel panic?
/var/log will be different since you'll be running from a live CD.