slow to log out

I don't have a fix, but I can confirm that I am seeing this too.

I wondered if it was related to my external hard disk having to spin-up again after inactivity, but I even see this delay if the drive isn't connected.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated - this only started happening recently, but I can't remember if it started before or after a recent software update.

I've encountered the same problem. At one point it was taking 2 or 3 minutes to log out of os 10.5. I found out other users on the computer (my girls and wife) were accessing boot camp by power off shut downs of the o/s (either 10.5 or XP) and that the XP partition got to the point it was almost non-functional - taking almost 5 minutes to start. I rarely go to XP and only went there because one of the girls reported that "its real slow booting into Windows". Once I repaired the XP partition logging off in os 10.5 was much faster but perhaps still not quite as fast as I remember when I first loaded it just after 10.5.1 came out.

I just bought a new iMac (first Mac) on Feb 23, 2008 and for the first few days, all was well. Then my kids were complaining the new computer wasn't working. It was taking a long time to log out. I noticed the long logout only occured when my son connected and disconnected his (new) iPod classic. Then it started happening when I would mount and unmount an NFS directory. So it seems related to connecting to external file systems. Since I'm still in my 90 day support period, I'll call Apple and see what they have to say.

I just got off the phone with Apple desktop support. They had me run the Disk Utility (in Applications/Utilities folder). Select your system hard drive (on the left) and click on "Repair Disk Permissions". I tried connecting/disconnecting my iPod classic, then mounting/unmounting my NFS share, and then tried logging out. No more waiting!

You might also try deleting the user and system cache files.