Anytime I try and reboot or shut down it hangs on the please wait while rebooting the system or shutting down.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Until you get help towards the real issue, could you try to switch to runlevel 3 first and then try shutdown / reboot from there (in the console).
I remember some while ago I had a similar issue and that worked for me.
Also I remember reading on the forum here similar issues which were related to NFS mounts - maybe this would be your case.
Cheers.