I'm not powering off, ODD 5 year old hardware. [abandoned]

[mmmmna]

History: I've used MM2008 and MM2009, first live, then installed. These would shutdown correctly on this hardware. In order to boot those Live CDs (and many other distros live CDs), I need to manually edit the boot parameters to use noapic, nolapic, noacpi. Cannot skip setting those and still boot into a working OS. Sometimes, I also have to change acpi=on to acpi=off.

I have searched for 'power off' and the kagashe thread says [solved] but nobody explained HOW it got solved (did the user solve the problem by switching to Mandriva?).

My hardware is what my signature reads (2009.2: ECS RC410L/800-M (ATI chipset, ignoring onboard ATI graphics), ATI PCIe X800XL graphics card, 64 bit Celeron D 3.33GHz, 1G SDRAM, 2x IDE HDD, DVDRW, Dynex media reader, NEC Firewire card, Broadcom 4302 based wireless nic). The ATI chipset is performing what is commonly referred to as north/south bridge. The ATI chipset also provides onboard graphics which I am not using.

After installing each MiniMe, the installation process made correct choices about enabling whatever I disabled at boot time, because after installing, the system always shutdown correctly and I know that at least ACPI was no longer set to off. This information tells me that the live CD boot setup has a different ACPI situation from what gets installed.

Todays problem:
What should I do (please avoid commandline if possible) to convince 2009.2 to properly shutdown? Remember, if ACPI, APIC or LAPIC are enabled in the live CD, I won't boot.

Let me know what you need, I'll get back here as soon as I can but maybe not again today.

EDIT: I corrected some sentences, added link to chipset.

[Rudge]

History:
Todays problem:
What should I do (please avoid commandline if possible)

By "crippling" us with this one requirement, we are unable to ask what happens when you issue the command "poweroff" as root, so I wont ask. 

[mmmmna]

Apparently my problem was the particular ISO I burned had some issues. I'm posting from 2010 beta, it is installed to and running from my hard disk.

FWIW, the request for avoiding the commandline could have an outcome where you decide that under the circumstances, you are unable to respond.... as opposed to applying the word 'crippling' as a description of my request - I wouldn't ask that without reason - no need to start shaming people for their needs.

[Rudge]

Agreed mmmmna. My apologies.

[mmmmna]

Absolutely and totally.... accepted!! lol!