When I shutdown or restart my machine from X I get dropped to the first vt but all the shutdown message appear on vt 7 instead. Either the message should appear on vt 1 or I should get dropped directly to vt 7 from X so that I can see the shutdown messages.
shutdown messages appear on the tty that shutdown was initiated from (tty7). X on exit switches back to the tty that it was started from (tty1). With later plymouth/initscript packages, X is run from tty1; aside from that, this isn't solvable.