On my Asus Laptop, Kubuntu 9.04 quite often failed to turn off or reboot. The message was "* Will now halt" or "* Will now restart" and this message stayed there and did nothing. My solution was to hold the power button down until the laptop turned off 
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I found a better solution on the net which has worked well. To solve the halt I edited the file /etc/init.d/halt, commented out the line responsible for the failure and added the line as shown below.
To solve the restart I edited the file /etc/init.d/reboot, added the line as shown and commented out the one responsible for the failure.
Please remember that this is done in super user mode with you favorite text editor, which in my case is nano.
Hope this works for those who have encountered this problem.
NoWorries
.I found a better solution on the net which has worked well. To solve the halt I edited the file /etc/init.d/halt, commented out the line responsible for the failure and added the line as shown below.
Code:
log_action_msg "Will now halt" # halt -d -f $netdown $poweroff $hddown halt -d -f $poweroff $hddown
Code:
log_action_msg "Will now restart" # reboot -d -f -i reboot -d -f
Hope this works for those who have encountered this problem.
NoWorries