Unintended-upgrade in progress during shutdown

[s. c.]

i ceased to get shutdowns and restarts on mint cinnamon serena 18.1, so i changed from the preferred nvidia driver to the nouveau open source driver. since i made the driver change my os is often hanging indefinitely during restarts. this seems to be prevalent mostly with restarts, but i also get it intermittently with shutdowns.
i run an old intel board (dell xps 410-64 bit from 2007).
i went through all the 4.4 series kernels listed in the terminal. i finally tried the newest kernel:4.9.0-040900-generic , but the bug is still there.

can anyone give me instructions as to how to be rid of "Unintended-upgrade in progress during shutdown, sleeping for 5s" so my restarts and shutdowns will not hang?
if you need something else, please give a terminal command that will work.

cinnamon version: 3.2.7

file:///home/sncalaska/Pictures/sys%20info.jpg - i made this an attachment