[ubuntu-za] System won't shut down

[Bill Cairns]

A very strange problem. Everything seems to be working fine on my
10.04 system except that suddenly I cannot shut down. I click on the
little button on the top right and say "Shut Down" and it asks me if I
really want to shut down and I say yes and it just carries on and
ignores me. I get the same thing if I select "Log Out". And I mean it
really ignores me - the system just carries on running with no
indication that I had said anything at all.

If I select "Switch from bill" (bill being my user name) I get the log
in screen which has a its own "Shut Down" button (bottom right now)
and, if I go there, I can shut down properly. If I select  "bill2"
(bill2 being a test user on my machine) from the top right button, I
can log into bill2 happily and can shut down from there (it asks me
for my password for user name bill of course). The "Restart" works
fine.

Strange one! What can be inhibiting bill from shutting down? I think
this started a couple of days ago after I ran an update, but am not
really sure. I have also been trying to install a printer (HP CP1025)
at the same time and might have tweaked the wrong thing somewhere by
mistake while I had root privileges, but I don't think that I did
anything ...

Bill (person Bill not username bill)