Comment 3 for bug 439316

initctl emit is supposed to block until the upstart jobs hung off that event complete, so this is more likely to be usplash's fault. Could you grep for usplash processes instead of gdm, and show us what's running there?

I suspect that 'usplash_write QUIT' is blocking because nothing is listening on the usplash FIFO, in which case the only reliable fix for this is likely to be sorting out the usplash main loop so that we can just send it SIGTERM.