** Reply to message from BandiPat
Ok, Gil, I think we might be back to someone else's suggestion then. You have a stray program running that KDE can't seem to kill on shutdown. You can close anything running, especially non-KDE programs down before attempting to logout. Be sure to check your systray for anything there, other than normal stuff and check the taskbar for any other windows/programs open still. If that works to cure your problem, then if you like, you can start eliminating them one by one, until you find the rogue program! If it continues to hang after quitting everything, then we might have a program that closes it's window, when you select quit from the menu, but not actually quitting! You can press ctrl-esc to get kdesysguard up and see if they all quit and were removed from the list of processes.
Lee, my guess is that it's my e-mail program (Polarbar). From time to time when I click reply or forward I do not get a complete new screen into which I would enter the new message and address. Instead I get a blank window -- not fully "painted"). My guess is that I'm having some sort of video problem. When I get the partially painted window it hangs the e-mail program, and I have to do ctrl/alt/esc (or use the sysguard) to kill the program. I'm thinking that maybe something is causing the e-mail program to remain open in the background, even though it doesn't appear in the system tray at the bottom of the screen. I am still pursuing this as a possibility. I will let you know if I can make any more definitive conclusions based on my investigations. Thanks Gil