Shutdown hangs

Very many thanks to everyone who so kindly responded to my initial message. I have traced the cause of the problem to the fact that, when installing an updated version of util-linux, I replied incorrectly to one of the configuration options. As a result, the util-linux utilities "halt", "reboot" and "shutdown" over-wrote those that come with SuSE, which are based on SysVinit. Reverting to the latter has resolved the problem. -- Robin Cosby