Hi. I've been having a problem much like this that I posted about in the thread of someone else, as my problem was more similar to theirs. In addition to not being able to shut down I am having issues with windows explorer.Norton360, teamspeak, microsoft office, firefox, filezilla, adobe acrobat reader and presenter.
That is all the programs i have installed so far lol
When I have a crashed program (all too frequent) I have to restart or shutdown to be able to even use the programs. In cases like that, I find I usually have to repeatedly click on restart or shutdown for it to work, and then it takes forever.
Have you tried to kill non-responsive programs in task manager?