Question: Just loaded Ubuntu 10.10 and loaded all updates on a hard drive by itself (without Windows). Would like to change the time for the system to shut down automatically from 60 seconds to 5 seconds, thus just hitting the shutdown icon once and in 5 seconds the system would shut down or give me just enough time to hit the restart button if I wanted to restart. Any way to do it??

Answer: 
There's no way to configure the timeout currently, and in fact the timeout has been removed. But there is a couple of wishlist bugs to add it back and make it configurable that you might be interested in commenting on:

<https://bugs.launchpad.net/indicator-session/+bug/623804>

and

<https://bugs.launchpad.net/indicator-session/+bug/607575>

You shouldn't shutdown a user session with "sudo shutdown -h now" but should instead tell the session you want to shutdown with "gnome-session-save --logout" or if there are programs inhibiting the layout "gnome-session-save --force-logout".
Open dialogs:

`Ctrl` + `Alt` + `Del` → `/usr/lib/indicator-session/gtk-logout-helper --logout`

`/usr/lib/indicator-session/gtk-logout-helper --shutdown`

`/usr/lib/indicator-session/gtk-logout-helper --restart`

Create your own Shortcuts, e.g. `Ctrl` + `Alt` + `End` for shutdown.

Source: [ubuntuusers.de](http://forum.ubuntuusers.de/post/3958927/)