/sbin/shutdown -h now doesn't?

[aluminumsulfate at earthlink.net]

   Has anyone else ever noticed this *and* bothered to figure out why ? :)
   I'd love to know!

Yes and no.  Yes, I have seen this, but no, I never did debug it.
I've seen this problem using custom kernels I've built and used on
both Slackware and Debian.  Note that, when this happens, kill usually
still works.  So a workaround might be to invoke /etc/rc.d/rc.{6,0}
(or equivalents) directly.  Then, the scripts merrily go about killing
processes, unmounting stuff, and rebooting the machine.

My best *guess* would be some problem with init reading initctl?

Dave