But now that I am using ubuntu for almost everything, I finally ran into the problem last night.
The solution is to set speech-dispatcher's attribute `run` to YES. I am not exactly sure why it works, so if anyone knows it would be greatly appreciated if you would comment on this and let me know. It ust doesn't make sense that tampering with `speech dispatcher` would change the shut down function. But, Nevertheless, the solution is to open and edit a certain file and then shutdown:
Run this in the terminal:
gedit /etc/default/speech-dispatcherthe file should open in gedit, now edit it so it says
RUN=yes
Now try shutting down. Best of Luck.