What is the cleanest way to shutdown in a gnome-session?

[Dan Hensley <dan hensley worldnet att net>]

I'm trying to figure out what the cleanest way is to shutdown my machine
from an account that is using gnome-session.  Last night I shut down my
machine by su'ing as root and then running gshutdown.  There were a few
problems:

1)  Device / was busy, so it forced a check on reboot.  This happens
quite often, and I'm not sure of the cause.  I've only noticed it since
I upgraded to 2.2.x kernel, and moreso now that I'm using gnome-session.

2)  When I restarted the machine and logged in, gnome-session tried to
restart gshutdown as user, so I natually got the message about not being
able to use it as non-root.  Is there any way to manage Gnome
applications from gnome-session?  What I'd really like to do is not have
it restart applications that were running during my last logout, or at
least have more control.  Along these lines, is it possible to have
gshutdown allow shutdown and reboot for non-root users if I set-uid
shutdown?

3)  It seems as though Gnome did not exit cleanly, because I had a core
dump from one of the Gnome components.  I _always_ get one when logging
back in
after an unnatural gnome-session logout (i.e. shutdown,
<CTRL>-<ALT>-<BACKSPACE>).  The application that dumps will vary, but it
will always happen.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Dan