I've had a problem recently where my new MacBook has been very slow to shut down. I was unable to point to any change I'd made which happened at the same time as the problem started. But I did notice that if I were to log in as another user on the machine then the problem disappeared - I was sure it was something I had done to my account but wasn't sure where to start looking...
Recently I installed Tunnelblick, a MacOS X GUI for OpenVPN. This ran fine on Tiger, and fine when I upgrade the Tiger machine to Leopard. But I did have a lot of issues (known issues) getting it to install and work on the fresh Leopard prep of my MacBook. But work it did, eventually, and I thought no more of it.
It is now obvious that Tunnelblick is the cause of the problems. I can't get it to quit, it just hangs. The same will be happening on shutdown, but MacOS will eventually kill it to switch the machine off.
The solution is to wait for a fix for this very important bit of software. The website was last updated two months ago stating that there was a problem. Initially I thought it was 7 months out of date and that the project was dead, but the site is using a USA date format.
Until then, load the software only when needed and remove it using Activity Monitor immediately afterwards.
