My iMac won't restart or shut down. What can I do?

I closed all my programs and windows and clicked on "RESTART" but it just hangs after my desktop icons/dock/etc have disappeared. I can still see my wallpaper, and I get the rainbow timer wheel spinning round, but it just sits there. I've left it for like 3 hours, no change.
Last time I had this issue, I force quit by pressing the shut down button, and that was not the best idea, because after that my mac won't start up at all and had to take it to a local Mac store so they would help me with this. They said that a program was corrupted ...
I don't want this to happen again, so I was wondering what can I do??

This is not a reply. I just want to elaborate on this problem.
My computer freezes occasionally when it is used after being sleep for a while. The spinning ball appears and everything is totally disabled. Nothing on the keyboard works.
The mouse moves, but does not work.
The only solution is to turn the power off and on (losing all data in open applications.)
I kept the System monitor running on the side to find out which program was running when the computer froze. The Monitor as well as all other applications froze, but the data showed:
Firefox 18.4%
Activity Monitor 0.9%
Firefox Plugin 0.2%
This is all the information I have. By the way, I am using iMac with OS 10.6.

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IMac won't restart nor shut down

Hello,
I purchased a new iMac about three months ago and, since receiving it, I notice that it will not usually shut down or restart. It gets as far as the spinning/rotating pinwheel (not the rainbow colored one) and just hangs up there. I've let it sit there for as long as 25 minutes...it just stays stuck there and the only way out is to press and hold the power button down to force a shutdown. And this happens whether I'm restarting or shutting down.
Mine is a 21.5 inch iMac running Yosemite (currently 10.10.2)
2.7 Ghz Intel Core i5
16 GB RAM
I'm not very sophisticated with the internal hardware, so I'm not sure what other information would be helpful to list.
Does anyone know how to remedy this problem? Or do I have to take the computer back? (Hoping to avoid the latter)
Thanks
Chris

Welcome to Apple Discussions.
Disconnect all peripherals, (unmount any firewire devices before disconnecting) just your Apple keyboard and mouse and test.
If it is not a peripheral check in /startup items. OS X installs no items to that file by default, so anything there is yours. Also check System Preferences>> accounts >>login items and deselct them.
-mj
[email protected]

IMac Won't Restart ou Shut Down

Hello,
I have an iMac 3.1GHz Intel Core i5 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 (OS X 10.9.1)
Suddenly the Restar, Shut Down and Log Out buttons don't work anymore.
The Sleep button is working fine.
Disk Utility found no errors.
I've already restart using the power button.
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Found a simple solution that I think will help a lot of people with this problem.
Go to Lybrary/Prefernces/
Delete the file "com.apple.loginwindow.plist".
(Don't worry, it will creat a fresh new as soon as you star your machine again)
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Hi, Jerry -
Welcome to Apple's Discussions.
By chance do you have a utility named File Saver installed? I think it came with either Norton Utilities or TechTool at one time. If so, try disabling it.
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Steve:
My formerly reliable PBg4 will not restart or shut down with this new OS 10.4x
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Hi Dalton,
Welcome to discussions.
Have you tried to repair permissions ?
http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?128@@.6893ed83
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Lyssa,
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Welcome to Apple Discussions!
Backup your data first since you still have access to it as my FAQ* explains:
http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html
Once that is down, force restart it by removing both the battery and power cord and repair the disk with the original installer disk that came with the MacBook:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
If that can't repair the Mac, you may need Alsoft Disk Warrior.
* Links to my pages may give me compensation.

Won't restart or shut down

Tonight, I was unable to get either Expose to work or bring up my dashboard widgets with my usual mighty mouse buttons. I was able to manually switch between several windows by either clicking on the window or if hidden, click again on the dock icon. So I thought I’d restart to see if that fixed it. I was unable to shut down from the Apple menu. All that happened was the Menu bar & desktop aliases disappeared while the wallpaper & dock remained. I tried repairing Disk Permissions but, after the repair no change. No menu bar or aliases. I did try the control-command-eject keyboard restart without success. (I have never used this b4) I did not try any terminal commands to shut down. (“shutdown -h now”) Never used those before & am not yet well versed in using terminal. I finally held the power button for 15 seconds to force the shutdown. Now after a restart, everything seems to work & I can normally restart from the Apple menu.
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Hi japmac,
Thanks for your reply. Sorry for the delay but, I didn’t know exactly how to do what you described. I was waiting to see if it happened again, it didn’t.
Today I had another problem which I will soon post separately. Went to wake iMac from sleep & screensaver was frozen in screen. So I tried keyboard commands to close programs & restart--nothing. I did some research in David Pogue’s Missing Manual for Leopard. I force shut down with power button, I booted up in SAFE MODE & restarted with my Leopard DVD in. Then I held the “C” key till I got the Mac OSX installer screen & DID NOT click continue. I waited till the menu bar appeared & chose utilities/Disk Utilities & was able to repair disk as you suggested. Got message “The volume Mac HD appears to be OK” so I also did another repair disk permissions. It completed much as it had done w/o the Leopard DVD. BTW, I had quite a bit of trouble figuring out how to eject the DVD & restart normally! Solution was to quit installer from the menu bar & then select restart and then HOLD DOWN THE MOUSE BUTTON to cause the DVD to eject. This was surely NOT intuitive. Anyway I don’t know if Repair disk does anything when it says disk was OK. I suspect not.

My iMac won't restart or shut down. What can I do?

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