I spent lots of time configuring my Ubuntu 8.10 installation, installing all the required softwares. The best thing i could do was to install Prozilla- the download manager which is really awesome. Also i installed all the IDEs, RDBMS that i use. But when i tried to shutdown my system it used to hang. This used to annoy me like hell. I then googled for this problem and came across the following solution which worked for me: