Karmic Shutdown Problem

apparently new kernel versions for Karmic do not play nicely with this old Pentium 4 Dell system. The default repo kernel is 2.6.31-22, but the system hangs on shutdown.

reverting back to kernel 2.6.31-20 solves the problem, the system shuts down just as before.

to change the kernel upon boot, i modified /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_DEFAULT="Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-20-generic"

also, to disable the hidden grub menu (i.e. force the menu to be shown):

#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0