Cannot Shut Down or Restart when other users are logged on.

Question

Cannot Shut Down or Restart when other users are logged on.

I have 2 users on my iMac, myself and one other person. I am the administrator of the computer.

When we are both logged in and I go to Apple Menu>Shut Down (or Restart) the (Administrator) Name/Password prompt pops up as usual. When I enter my Administrator Name and Password I get the following message on the screen: "Invalid Username or Password".

I found that when I open up the other user and then log that user out, I am then able to shut down (or restart) with no further problems as Leopard then accepted my Administrator Name and Password.

This is most likely a bug in Leopard, since I have no problems in other areas where authentication is required, like installing new software or making changes in System Preferences.

Have others experienced the same issue, and found a solution for this?

24" Intel iMac: 2.4GHhz Intel Core 2 Duo, 3GB RAM, 320GB hard drive., Mac OS X (10.5.1), 500GB external hard drive. Running Time Machine.

Posted on Jan 4, 2008 12:34 PM

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Answer 1

Jan 4, 2008 2:03 PM in response to Abrasha Staszewski

Did you check that you are still administrator of the machine, and the other user is not ?

Perhaps completely unrelated, but may worth the reading : http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306876

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Answer 2

biovizier

Level 5

7,931 points

Jan 4, 2008 4:17 PM in response to Abrasha Staszewski

I don't know if this is the case in your situation, but there is apparently a silly bug with that authentication dialogue where the buttons don't work. However the workaround is trivial since pressing the "return" or "enter" key after typing the password allows the shutdown or reboot to proceed.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=307123

As the article warns, using this method will result in the loss of unsaved changes in the other accounts.

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Answer 3

Jan 4, 2008 4:59 PM in response to biovizier

It is almost certainly best to log out each user before restarting/shutting down because that way any settings and cache data that need to be written on logout will get written. It isn't obvious that accounts will continue to work properly otherwise; see e.g. http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6130419

But if you want to ignore that, another way to shut down the computer is via Terminal, if you are the Administrator:
sudo shutdown now
turns the computer off.
sudo shutdown -r now
restarts the computer. The same caveats re losing work/settings apply.

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Answer 4

Jan 4, 2008 2:44 PM in response to Yann Bizeul

Yes, I am the administrator, and the other user is not.

And yes, that article is "completely unrelated". 🙂

Message was edited by: Abrasha Staszewski

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