First I'll say what I'd like to know then why; I really just want to know the "what" but include the "why" in case you're interested so answering just the "what" is fine with me.

the what

Exactly what is xfce4 doing when I hit "shutdown/restart" from the GUI "quit" button?  I understand /usr/libexec/xfsm* is involved somehow but is that just for shutdown or restarts too?  Does it pass options to xfsm*?  Does it pass options to xfsm* depending on whether it's "shutdown" or "restart"?  What are they?  Is xfsm* in turn calling something else/passing options?  From the standpoint of xfce, what's different between a shutdown and a restart?

the why

I'm using gentoo/xfce4.4, xorg 7.1 and when I hit "quit" and then "shutdown" OR "restart" I don't always get dropped back to tty1 (X/xfce is running on tty7) for shutdown/restart. 

Two different things happen for those times I do NOT get dropped back to tty1 (and I've discovered no pattern so don't know how to force any of these to happen):

1) xfce ostensibly exits and I get dropped back to my login mgr and the machine shuts down/restarts from there, or

2) xfce ostensibly exits, I get dropped back to my login GUI then NOTHING happens until I hit "ctl-alt-F1" to manually switch to tty1.  I could sit there for 5 minutes looking at the login GUI but the instant I press ctl-alt-F1 shutdown/restart runs.  Once I did this, machine didn't shut down, I logged back in, xfce started, I ran a couple things then hit ctl-alt-F1 and the machine immediately commenced to shutting down.

I run xfce as non-root but followed all the instructions for non-root shutdown (incl. the /etc/sudoers entry for xfsm*) and if I don't start X, I can shut down/restart just fine as non-root - so that isn't the problem.

I've looked at a million possibilities so this will either tell me xfce isn't involved in this problem or hopefully it is and how.

Thanks.