After some more investigation I found that if I did
sudo /etc/init.d/hsqldb-server stop
before shutting down then the shutdown would complete fine.
Yet more investigation revealed that editing /etc/hsqldb.conf and setting
HSQLDB_OWNER=my_id
and changing the owner and group of the database directory and files in
/var/lib/hsqldb
to my_id allowed the shutdown to complete successfully without the forced stop of the server above.
After some more investigation I found that if I did d/hsqldb- server stop
sudo /etc/init.
before shutting down then the shutdown would complete fine.
Yet more investigation revealed that editing /etc/hsqldb.conf and setting
HSQLDB_OWNER=my_id
and changing the owner and group of the database directory and files in
/var/lib/hsqldb
to my_id allowed the shutdown to complete successfully without the forced stop of the server above.
Hope that these might help....