Leopard sometimes has trouble shutting down

[samira85]

I'm a first-time Mac user, having bought a Macbook about 3 weeks ago. It's the most basic version with a CD/DVD combo drive and 120 GB hard disk. For about 2 weeks it was working fine and I had some new programs installed, like MS office, Xee, Adobe and Neo Office. Now, for almost a week, my Macbook has been acting weird. Like, sometimes, I see that there's a colorful circle twirling on the finder menu and when I try to shut down, everything disappears - the cursor, Finder and dock - except the wallpaper. And then I have to shut it down manually. This has happened thrice so far and I can't imagine it's good for the laptop because it takes a bit more time to start up now. I should also mention that my Macbook isn't connected to the internet so I haven't installed any OS updates; I saw in the applications folder that the preinstalled programs were there from February 2008.
Can anyone tell me what the problem is? I'm really scared and I hope to God it isn't a hardware problem . Has anyone else faced the same problem? Are there any Apple updates to fix this? Please help me!

 

[varmit]

I'm a first-time Mac user, having bought a Macbook about 3 weeks ago. It's the most basic version with a CD/DVD combo drive and 120 GB hard disk. For about 2 weeks it was working fine and I had some new programs installed, like MS office, Xee, Adobe and Neo Office. Now, for almost a week, my Macbook has been acting weird. Like, sometimes, I see that there's a colorful circle twirling on the finder menu and when I try to shut down, everything disappears - the cursor, Finder and dock - except the wallpaper. And then I have to shut it down manually. This has happened thrice so far and I can't imagine it's good for the laptop because it takes a bit more time to start up now. I should also mention that my Macbook isn't connected to the internet so I haven't installed any OS updates; I saw in the applications folder that the preinstalled programs were there from February 2008.
Can anyone tell me what the problem is? I'm really scared and I hope to God it isn't a hardware problem . Has anyone else faced the same problem? Are there any Apple updates to fix this? Please help me!

Let the laptop sit when all that is left is the wallpaper. That is how OSX shuts down at times, I notice it more if I don't let the computer stay on overnight. Which I think its possibly doing the maintenance jobs on shutdown that OSX would normally do overnight if you left it on. Have you ever left your computer on overnight? If not, and you don't want to do that, you can use something like macjanitor: http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/macjanitor.html Macjanitor will run the maintenance tasks and possibly solve your problem. If this doesn't help, let us know.

I would also go ahead and download the updates.