New to Mac and a slight problem

I have had this macbook w/leopard for about 1.5 months and have seen this one problem a few times.

When shutting down I git the circular loading ring bottom third of screen and it just sits there till I hard press the on/off button to get tit to shutdown. I do not have any problems when powering up after this.

I have no idea where the repair tools or diagnostics are on this machine and will start looking but was wanting to see if anyone may have insights on this. No errors or other messages follow.

If you leave your machine after shutting it down does it eventually shut down?
When you shut down a mac running OSX after being logged out your screen will usually go blue (I think it's blue - correct me if I'm wrong) and the spinning icon will appear at the bottom. When OSX has finished shutting down all the processes it'll just power off.

Ash

It shows the desktop with the spinning prompt and did not shut down about 5 times and I have to hard boot the button to shut down.

I do get the blue screen on a normal shutdown.

You might have a problem with one of your startup items not quitting properly. Try starting up your mac and holding down the shift key at the same time. This will boot into safe mode. Safe Boot basically temporarily disables login items and non-essential kernal extension files. Try shutting it down after a Safe Boot and see if it shuts down normally. If it does then you may have a problem with one of your startup items not ending properly.

Ash