Or you could go through Init 0 and slim down the actions it takes, or even make it all symmetrical(in rc0.d).
My updated system shuts off pretty quickly, so I don't know how much success I can report, but I'll try on the laptop and see how it goes...
Well, I guess
root@lappy:~# init 0
is just a faster way to do shutdown(because it is quite a bit faster: does the kill everything right away instead of waiting.)