The hibernate, restart, shut down on Ubuntu 9.10 all appear to default
to the restart mode.

This seems to be a recent problem.

I did the upgrade route from 9.04, a week after it became available,
with no major glitches.

I am not doing anything complex like image or video manipulation.

The only recent addition was installing WINE to see if I could find a
way to install the PayPal button.