Solved my "Mavericks won't shut down" problem

After installing Mavericks on my MBP-Retina the 'shut down' function no longer powered-off the machine. It would hang, with a light grey screen, indefinately. To power-off the MBP I had to press and hold down the power button.
I have had a Lacie 500 MB aux drive plugged into a USB port on the computer. Have had for a couple of years.
I unmounted the Lacie drive, unplugged it and selected the 'shut down' option from the apple icon at the top left corner of the screen. The MBP shut down and powered-off in seconds. I have tried it several times, both with and without the USB drive plugged in. In every case it hung on shut down when the USB drive was plugged in and powered-off in seconds when the USB drive was not plugged in. Go figure.

I have the problem too, but when I select Shut Down from the Apple Menu, it kills all the processes and leaves me at the desktop, still able to run process anew.
If I try to relaunch the finder, it will not relaunch. But many apps will relaunch, such as Chrome, or terminal.
If I open a terminal and do shutdown -h now it will shut down.
I have a variety of peripherals but really, none of them should have the power to prevent a shutdown, especially without any notification of an issue.
I tried unmounting my thunderbolt external drive (the only drive attached) but no change.
I have USB hubs and flash drives on them, and mouse/kybd etc but no other drives. I have two monitors.
Very frustrating, how to debug?

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HELP!!!
Here are the specs of my machine:
2011 13.3" MacBook Pro
4 GB Ram/320 GB HD
For the past several months my MacBook Pro refuses to shut down or restart without holding down the power button. Whenever I choose to restart or shut down the computer, it will hang on a grey screen. I have even tried letting it hang for an hour, and it still won't shut down. I notice that once in a while it will retart or shut down correctly if I had not used opened iTunes since turning it on. However, even manually closing iTunes before shutting down or restarting does not solve the problem. It seems as though it only shuts down if iTunes was not used since restarting the computer. Is this a registry error? Do I need to reinstall iTunes? I noticed this problem began happening after I uninstalled Kaspersky Virus Scanner, could that be the problem as well? Also, I cannot guarantee that the problem is only associated with iTunes. I just noticed that one of the few times it shut down or restarted correctly, iTunes coincidentally had not been used. Also, this problem started happening while I was still using Lion and has continued despite upgrading to Mountain Lion.
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I have this question too.

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Okay, just realized that the same problem occurs with the MBP after rejecting the external HD
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It seems to be a general problem with connecting an external HD once in a while for doing a time machine back up regularly and then eject it. So the question is: who has the same problem or does everybody have their HD permanently connected to their Macs for Back ups? Either by USB or WLAN? It never was a problem wit Mavericks and I don't want to permanently back up my system every hour - once a week is good for me BUT this cannot be adjusted in the time machine settings which would be a very good idea.
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Solved my "Mavericks won't shut down" problem

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