Well I just found out that its the wifi card :-) I used verbose mode to log in and and then eyeballed it as it shutdown. It ran quickly but I caught a glimpse of it saying something to the extent of "either remove inet6 from en0" and then vanished...I figured "what the hell..." The Ralink adapter has to have it's program constantly running to stay connected; specifically if the wifi SSID is password encrypted. So I rebooted then closed the program, removed the adapter from its base and shutdown. It was a perfect shutdown :-) Now the only question remains is why the adapter did that. Either some brave soul may want to look into it or we have to wait on a fix from Ralink that makes the adapter and its drivers work correctly for 10.5.8.