Ubuntu install succeeds but hangs on shutdown

[ikes]

I have a Dell Inspiron 6400 and just bought a shiny new OCZ Vertex 2 Plus SSD drive. I've been able to format the drive with GParted from a live session running off of a thumb drive running 11.04 and can then see my partitions when installing from that thumb drive. The install seems to succeed and asked me if I'd like to continue working or reboot. I say reboot and it tells me to remove my install media. I remove the USB stick, reboot and the install seems to work just fine. Then when I shutdown again, the shutdown hangs at the screen that just says "Ubuntu" with the 5 cycling progress dots. These dots just continue running so its not truly hung, but it wont shut down. Eventually (half hour) I kill power manually and it comes back up and I get a Grub error. I've now installed half a dozen different times trying Ext2/3/4 and trying my Ubuntu partition at the beginning and middle of the drive. I've previously had Ubuntu installed on an older 5400RPM IDE drive. I don't think the disk is dead because the install works smoothly. Any other thoughts on what to try? I've also dropped to another temrinal (CTRL+ALT+F1/2/3/4/5/6) to see what was running but this is hung and I can't type anything.

Thanks!