Potato locked up on shutdown - processes still running

[Mark M <z1035495@student.unsw.edu.au>]

Hi, 
For a few months now, I have had the error message - `/dev/hda4 busy - 
mounted ro' (hda4 is my /var) after all partitions are unmounted on 
shutdown. I haven't worried about it too much up until now. 

After running for about 20 days and then shutting down, init froze with
`processes still running' (or something similar) before unmounting any
drives (actually before saving random seed I think). I could switch 
consoles, but init had stopped most services so I couldn't log in.

The following few shutdown -r now's worked as before (with the hda4 
busy).

I am running potato on a 2.2.12 kernel with Hedrick's 
ide.2.2.12.19990925 patch. Unfortunately one critical (for me) part 
of this patch didn't make it into 2.2.13 so I don't want to upgrade yet.

Anyone seen anything similar?

Regards,
Mark.