Hang on logout/restart/shutdown

[allbread]

I'm currently running Linux Mint 10 (Ubuntu 10.10) on my Thinkpad W500 and have encountered an annoying issue... essentially I get an intermittent hang when I attempt to restart or logout.

This problem has been made more visible as of late possibly due to my screwing around with the hybrid switcheroo configurations (see: http://asusm51ta-with-linux.blogspot.com/ if you dare) but I don't know if this is the root cause... at least I don't recall directly if this problem started only when I made the changes detailed in the switcheroo procedure.

What is odd is that when I attempt to reboot via an application (in this case the UNetBootin utility) everything seems to work fine, however, attempting to do the same via the main desktop "Menu" usually causes a hang.

Although I've done my best with the details I know the description above is still vague, however, being relatively new to Linux (at least for anything beyond a regular user) I'm not sure where to start in terms of troubleshooting...

So, in short, where do I start?

[WthIteh]

So, in short, where do I start?
You could start by checking result of

dmesg
You may find there error messages about the underlying issue.

[allbread]

Thanks for the suggestion.

I did this and the only error messages I could grep from the file were:

[ 2.321362] [drm:atom_op_jump] *ERROR* atombios stuck in loop for more than 1sec aborting
[ 2.321367] [drm:atom_execute_table_locked] *ERROR* atombios stuck executing F6D8 (len 487, WS 0, PS 4) @ 0xF719
[ 3.361344] [drm:atom_op_jump] *ERROR* atombios stuck in loop for more than 1sec aborting
[ 3.361348] [drm:atom_execute_table_locked] *ERROR* atombios stuck executing F6D8 (len 487, WS 0, PS 4) @ 0xF719

(from the output of dmesg executed after a hard restart)

Any ideas?

There are also a number of log files in /var/log (including a number of older dmesg.* log files)... would any of these be relevant?

In reference to restart/logout/shutdown issues (additionally I cannot "wake" my laptop once it has gone to sleep) what should I be looking for in terms of error messages?