I had a series of surprises while enjoying my desktop system's reliability up to now after the 5.18.0 update though I am not convinced that is the cause.

A WiFi dongle stopped working.
The USB it had been plugged into did not automount an MP3 player.

So I decided to do a restart.
I got the Neon 5.18.0 logo and spinning spiral endlessly.
I waited more than 24 hours. Still spinning.

What do you suggest doing first?
Is it risky to just do a forced reset or shutdown.?

Any idea of what happened? I have not found the exact symptoms in a forum post or google search.

If it is still in that state, try pressing ESC - it may show what it got stuck at.

It's probably safe to restart (first try Ctl+Alt+DEL before hitting the reset or holding down the power button).

I had the case not too long ago where one of my computers refused to boot (after adding memory). Problem turned out to be that I bumped the cables off one of the drives, though not the boot drive, but it refused to boot anyway. I noticed in the messages after hitting ESC that it had an error mounting a drive.

Yes, it is in the same state.

Pressing ESC revealed 2 cycles of shutting down messages and the start of a third.
Each except the first 2 lines and 2 others are marked with "OK" in the left side of the screen.

The third cycle began and did not proceed further after these two lines:
Starting reboot . . .
Stopped monitoring of LVM2 mirrors, snapshots etc., using dmeventd or progress polling . . .

I don't know what to try after ESC.. I have not tried the shutdown Alt or Ctrl Alt Del, etc.
I am wondering what to do if I bring it down and starting up does not go well.

I will look up dmeventd but don't expect to gain useful info for this problem.

Thanks for the tip on ESC.

If you can get to a TTY console (Ctrl+Alt+F2) and log in, you could take a look at /var/log/boot.log for any hints what the problem might be (towards the end of the file). You need root access to read the file, something like:

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sudo less /var/log/boot.log

or:

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sudo nano /var/log/boot.log

I tried several Ctrl-Alt-Fs to get a login, but got no terminal screen, so I blindly logged in and did a sudo shutdown. None worked.
So I decided to force a hard stop by holding down the power button.

Luckily, on booting into recovery mode, all looks OK.
I have a separate /home. I checked space on it and the OS disk.
/home is essentially full: 95% at this time with 6.5 GB free of 134.5 GB on sda6.

I have a Kubuntu live DVD with Partition Manager and my notes from the last time I adjusted things.
I will start figuring out what to move, etc.
If you have comments or suggestions I welcome them.

(In my temporary move into my partner's place while my condo is remodeled, 3 months so far but ending within weeks, I have lost track of where my portable WD backup disk is, but I have a conventional WD drive with lots of space I can backup to using a live Clonezila disk to image /home, etc.)