Comment 4 for bug 1249266

I'm also effected by this bug. Similar to the original reporter I've also upgraded from 13.04 to 13.10 on a dell workstation (T-1600 in my case) and the shutdown and restart buttons also don't have any effect for me. I'll end up back on the desktop.

However I can shutdown by pressing the power button on the machine, this will initiate the shutdown process and it works.
Also via the terminal shutdown and reboot work.