I only have my icloud email in it... and yeah I've tried it, but it still doesn't work :/
How much memory and hard disk space is empty?
I have over half of the disk empty and memory is 2GB...
Memory is 2 GB.. thats tight. Maybe its clearing out the virtual memory before it shuts down as there are too many services and programs running? Just a guess.
Now boot your laptop and don't run anything. Check your activity monitor and kill all the user(your) processes. Maybe you have a lot of small programs running like google drive, evernote etc etc...
Now do a shutdown and see what happens.
2GB isn't too bad for me, because I don't usually have a lot of background processes running... It usually has about 100mb free when I have larger apps like Aperture running
Anyway yes I have tried that (along with purging the RAM) but it doesn't have much of an effect, however I recently did a couple restarts and it was pretty quick... Weird
Well something is not responding to the kill command issued by the OS during shutdown.
I guess you have to try a reinstall of the OS...
Why shut down when you can just close the lid?