I've had this problem with 12.04 for a while. Had no idea what caused it. Found a fix in ubuntuforums renaming priorities in upstart scripts but never bookmarked the thread(12.04beta)
Struggled on recent install until I noticed reboot/shutdown worked when dropping to tty1 and stopping lightdm service. I have updated my AMD graphics driver to Catalyst version 12.4 and so far everything is back to normal, including plymouth. Will see if it persist. -- Radeon HD 6700 Series ; i7-2600 ; H67 Express Chipset Linux bean-desktop 3.2.0-24-generic #39-Ubuntu SMP Mon May 21 16:52:17 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/987220 Title: System does not power off reliably when "Shut Down" chosen from GUI To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/indicator-session/+bug/987220/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs