Hi

befor you go killing process, look into them carfully, look to see if you are the only one connected. in v$session you can see the bd user, the terminal name and the os user, so no probelm there. if you have transaction running you may end up waitnig for it to finish befor you can shutdown. accourding to what you say, it sound's imposible to me, that yopu have something that should prevent the db from normaly shutiong down. do you have a dblink? You are running a multi-master replication environment or an updatable-snapshot environment ? something? shutdown immediate has to have a resone to hang there.