It stops fine for me... how does it fail?

I don't know. I get no error, and the logs have nothing useful in them.

Apart from adding -x to the init script, how can I get it to show me what's wrong?
Stopping it manually right now works find, it only fails on shutdown.

-x is probably the best bet... it shuts down fine for me in a Xen guest where I
just tried.  Does it _always_ fail on shutdown for you?

Running from runlevel 1, with ifup eth01, the problem seems to be not stopping,
but starting.

If I run yum-updatesd manually, it silently fails.
Running it through strace shows it cannot find dbus_bindings.pyx (or similar)

Do you have dbus-python installed?  Can you run
  /usr/sbin/yum-updatesd --no-fork
and see how it errors?

# rpm -q dbus-python
dbus-python-0.70-6

At runlevel 1:
# /usr/sbin/yum-updatesd --no-fork
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/yum-updatesd", line 29, in ?
    yumupd.main()
  File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yumupd.py", line 595, in main
    updd = UpdatesDaemon(opts)
  File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yumupd.py", line 304, in __init__
    self.emitters.append(DbusUpdateEmitter())
  File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yumupd.py", line 174, in __init__
    bus = dbus.SystemBus()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/dbus/_dbus.py", line 260, in __new__
    return Bus.__new__(cls, Bus.TYPE_SYSTEM, use_default_mainloop, private)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/dbus/_dbus.py", line 99, in __new__
    bus._connection = dbus_bindings.bus_get(bus_type, private)
  File "dbus_bindings.pyx", line 1692, in dbus_bindings.bus_get
dbus_bindings.DBusException: Failed to connect to socket
/var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: Connection refused

Oh, duh.  In runlevel 1, dbus isn't running.  You'll need to start the
messagebus service first

Okay, so why does it fail on shutdown?

It's running now. Let me reboot, and see if it fails to shutdown.

Created attachment 138613 [details]
Screenshot of -x output

Looks like it can't get the pid.
/var/run/yum-updatesd.pid does not exist on my box, but /usr/bin/python
/usr/sbin/yum-updatesd
 is running.

This happens for me as well

Yeah, but pidof should be finding it fine... does 'pidof -x yum-updatesd' find
the pid while the system is running?

[root@box ~]# pidof -x yum-updatesd
2333

[root@box ~]# ps axww|grep yum
 2333 ?        S      0:11 /usr/bin/python /usr/sbin/yum-updatesd
 4771 pts/0    S+     0:00 grep yum

Seconded:
[root@fcdesktop ~]# pidof -x yum-updatesd
2483

[root@box ~]# ls /var/run/y*
ls: /var/run/y*: No such file or directory

To make it clear: running
/etc/rc.d/init.d/yum-updatesd stop
from the command line works flawlessly.

I suggest that the title for this bug be changed from "yum-updatesd fails to 
stop on shutdown" to "yum-updatesd fails silently at startup".

This affected me.  I had a small bug in the config file (/etc/yum/yum-
updatesd.conf).  I'd forgotten an ='s on a line I added.  But, this didn't 
prevent "service yum-updatesd start" from saying " [  OK  ]".  So, I assumed it 
was working.  But, in fact, it failed at startup.  

Doing a "service yum-updatesd stop" will report "[FAILED]", because it wasn't 
running.  But, this isn't very helpful.

I couldn't fund any logfile that contained a message saying there was a 
problem.  Finally, I tracked down this bug and saw the suggestion to 
try "/usr/sbin/yum-updatesd --no-fork".  This reported the problem with my 
config file.  I was able to fix it and it's all working for me now.

But, I think it's clear that yum-updatesd has to do a better job of reporting 
what went wrong when it fails to startup.  

o "service yum-updatesd start" should not report "[  OK  ]"
o The error should be printed and logged somewhere (/var/log/messages ?)

Changing to devel so that someone notices!

Could either of you test yumupdatesd in rawhide and let me know if that solves
the problems in this bug? Reopen the bug if it does not.

To increase the chance of other people trying this, here is the copy and paste
version:
 yum --enablerepo=development upgrade yum-updatesd

I've installed it and will test with the next yum update.