I’ve been frustrated for the past few months, as my user account on my home desktop would take an intolerable amount of time when logging out just to show the logout dialog. I didn’t know what was causing it but didn’t really have the time to dig around the ‘net to find out what was up. My first search turned up nothing, so I didn’t “fix” it.
What compounded the frustration was that the kids’ user accouts were not affected this way (which was a relief, as I didn’t have to listen to any extra whining from them). Finally, last night, I decided to tackle this one.
Apparently, this is a known and unresolved bug. It seems that, in my desire to speed up my computer, I turned off a service that is causing this opposite effect. By turning off the Power Manager, I created this slowdown myself. I fifgured that there was no real need to run this daemon at startup, as I did not have a laptop.
Re-enabling the service fixed the problem, sort of. Now, I have an unneeded service running at start up. 
This seems to be a problem with me in Ubuntu 8.04 but not in Fedora 10.
