Trouble powering down.

Everytime I try to power down, log out, or restart, my Macbook fails to do so. It will stay at the wallpaper screen for a few minutes then pop up a message displaying that the OS cannot close Finder. I try to close Finder and try again. No luck. I finally end up having to manually shut it down by holding down the power button. It's really irritating me because my Macbook is fairly new (2 months) and it shouldn't be doing this.

run disk utility from utilities in your app folder, repair disk permissions. Its happened to me a couple of times and that has fixed it for me

Doesn't work. I'm going crazy about this.

bump to this.
Had my Macbook Pro for a year now. It's been acting weird lately and will not read thumb drives, CDs, and now it won't shut down! I click shut down or restart and nothing happens.... HELP!~

Folks,

This may not be the full solution, but certainly could help - download and install MainMenu from http://www.santasw.com/. The icon will appear in the upper right menu bar and you can go to MainMenu (at the bottom of the menu)>Preferences>Batch Tasks and check everything except maybe Empty Trash. This will clean up permissions, clear caches and do a good housecleaning. Run the Execute Batch Tasks every day or two and it will help keep your machine tuned up.

Onyx does the same thing, just that I happen to prefer MainMenu.

Hope this helps, Noel