Are we alone? Bought a laptop yesterday running windows 8. Last night it took over an hour to shut it down.?

NO WE ARE NOT ALONE.... THERE ARE MORE STARS THAN THERE ARE GRAINS OF SAND IN OUR WORLD AND MOST (99.99%) HAVE PLANETS....... AT LEAST ONE COULD HARBOR LIFE....

oh and.... it probably needed some updates to be installed since you just bought it soo yeah

:D

Further to other answers, this can be due to automatic updating - just spend a day booting up and shutting down until it's almost instant, any required updates will have installed and future updates are fewer and further between at least for a year or two.

I installed Vista on a pc recently and had to leave it overnight performing necessary updates after first boot, it's the same with Linux distributions too - once these are out of the way, things settle down to something much more like what you expect.

If it persists though - it could be e.g. a program that has included itself in your system initialisation so that it runs all the time in the background whether you have started it or not - a 'Terminate & Stay Resident' type [TSR] that Windows is not successfully closing with immediate effect...

I do not have Windows 8 however and cannot say for certain if this poses a problem in this version. Assuming though the same basic interface functions are there - you should be able to see what's running by starting Task Manager either by finding taskman.exe or using Ctrl+Alt+Del where manually ending the programs could speed up shutdown and point to what course of action will prevent needing to do this in future.

As you just recently bought it, it will have to go through some updates and that's pretty much all there is to it :)

see if it continues to take really long to shut each time.,.if yes, you need to take it back to the store to check it out

Updates !