It's incredibly confusing when you shutdown or reboot a system and you are presented with what looks like the "booting" screen. Using a backwards moving progressbar, or a different screen, or a static image, or anything else would better.
should be better now. Different plugins do different things, but they either show a static image now or a very brief animation and then a static image.
*** Bug 498639 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***