>     The Iris machines from EuroBraille do not have APM or ACPI support
>     to shut themselves down properly.

According to
www.multitech.com/en_us/news/articles/success_stories/eurobraille.pdf :

"EURObraille˘s latest invention is the IRIS portable assistant.
 The use of a powerful microprocessor coupled with the most advanced
 Microsoft Windows operating system provides the blind with a powerful
 computing solution"

What version of Microsoft Windows ships on this box?
Does it run in ACPI mode?  Does it power-off successfully?

Does Linux run in ACPI mode?
Please send along the dmesg from a Linux kernel built with:

CONFIG_ACPI=y
CONFIG_ACPI_DEBUG=y

thanks,
Len Brown, Intel Open Source Technology Center