shutdown normal

Hello Oracle gurus

I'm trying to shut down my instance by connecting as internal and issuing the "shudown normal" command, however, the database never shuts down. Ultimately I'm doing this to take physical backups of all my data files, control files, etc. How long should a shutdown normal operation take in a small (< 500 MB) database? Also, is there a way to insure that all users are disconnected? In DBA studio the only users that i see still connected are system for several background processes.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

• John