faulty shutdown for 3.4

[spurious]

I have booted from Cd with your "cheat" knoppix=acpi=off noacpi. And yes, that fixed it- for the first time it shutdown properly. Fantastic! Now how do I modify the HD install to do just that?

Try adding append="acpi=off noacpi" to /etc/lilo.conf (obviously, if there is already an append line there, add the acpi stuff to the existing list), then execute lilo.