bcooksley wrote:Does a new user log out quicker?

No, same thing: ~15 seconds before anything happens.

I am out of ideas. The only thing I can think of is that the system logoff time has been reduced by Qt4.5 or optimizations added in Trunk.

edgue wrote:Well, when I do "logout" or "turn off" I am used to close any application before that ... so there isnt much running.

I got a panel on the left hand side with some widgets ... some try stuff like workrave or the gnome network applet.

This won't answer your question but it might help you understand the system (and is related to your question).

I think one of the problems your having is a little bit of Windows brain polution.
KDE uses session management, Windows does not.
In Windows, when you log out the system just kills all of your programs and exits.
In KDE the system "saves your session" first so that if you had open windows or programs, they will be there when you log back in.

If you comapre Windows shutdown to KDE/Linux...
Windows logs you out quicker because of no session management responsibilities.
Linux will shut down quicker (after KDE logout) because it doesn't have to deal with things like persiting the registry, backing up the registry and all of the other weird stuff that evil thing called the registry does to your poor machine.

Odin wrote:I think one of the problems your having is a little bit of Windows brain polution.

I understand that point; but what I have heard so far ... ~15 seconds from triggering the logout and "logout begin activities" seem to high.

But maybe the reason is because I messed up my kubuntu when upgrading from 4.1 to 4.2 (i ran into some weired problems then) ... I guess its good enough for the moment; and as I intent to do a clean install with ubuntu 9.4 after official release; maybe that will help.