White Macbook takes a long time to shut down

[MasterNile]

I've noticed lately that my white macbook takes a long time to shut down even when I have no programs running, it closes finder then gets the circle in the lower center of the screen and takes somewhere between 1-5 mins to finish shutting down at this point, I saw a similar problem like this mentioned on another thread when I searched but it didn't have any possible solutions to the problem, anyone have any ideas?

[Satori]

I've noticed lately that my white macbook takes a long time to shut down even when I have no programs running, it closes finder then gets the circle in the lower center of the screen and takes somewhere between 1-5 mins to finish shutting down at this point, I saw a similar problem like this mentioned on another thread when I searched but it didn't have any possible solutions to the problem, anyone have any ideas?

You could try doing a bit of system housekeeping (cron tasks, cache tidy up, etc.) using a utility like OnyX. Also, run Disk Utility to check that all is well with your hard-drive and repair disk permissions. If all else fails, back-up and re-install the system.

[timestoby]

i agree with satori

[MasterNile]

Ok well I did the above (but don't know what cron tasks are) and it seems to shut down faster than it was before ~45 secs now, but when I used Onyx to check the preferences I get this:

/Users/master_nihilist/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iphotomosaic.plist:
Conversion of data failed. The file is not UTF-8, or in the encoding specified in XML header if XML.

I have a vague idea of what that means but to correct it do I just delete the .plist file?