Mac Book Pro, Shutdown & Restart problem

Hello, i'm fairly new to the mac scene, i've always been a windows person but i've switched over to mac. as you can see i have a mac-book pro and my problem is i cannot restart or shut it down. when i do it looks like its going to shut down or restart but all it does is becomes a blue screen and then my desktop pops right back up. the only way to turn it off now is to hold on to the power button but i don't feel right holding it down. and this happens also when i click on About this Mac on the apple context menu. i've tried to reformat the macbook with a new Tiger OSX cd but for some reason when i try to re-install it it says MAC OSX 10.4 cannot be installed on this machine. i've researched around but i havent been able to find a solution. i hope someone can help me. thank you in advance.

Sounds like you should take advantage of AppleCare if you have it. If a hard restart didn't solve the problem, I'm not sure what will. You could try running OnyX, but I don't know if that will solve the problem.

ring apple about it. tell them what is happening and what you have tried to get it to shutdown. - they will help you.