the problems with shutdown thus far have been with other apps not shutting down correctly which hangs the shutdown time. Major issues have been with sidebar itself and some gadgets themselves. Norton360 was a pain, framework would crash or not respond at various times. If not that then usually it has to do with the installation of programs or heavy install of in one cycle.
I have ran into this, but i have troubleshot most of the problems and have figured out the causes of most if any hangs now, and am still happy with the setup i have reflective to any changes that had to be made. A few i have to manually startup, but after sometime now on 7000, MS fixed the problem with this particular app. First they sent me the recommendation of manually starting up. After about a month of use on the desktop i had to use it on the lappy, and low and behold MS had fixed that startup issue with that app. Norton tried to fix this issue with this app itself by trying to delay the startup, which did work, but i pitched norton cuz of the framework crashing.
also, the lappy (less powerful) shuts down faster and starts up faster... but not many programs installed on it as desktop, just some gadgets running. go figure