OS X V10.7 Lion :: Starting And Quitting Activity Monitor Speeds Up Shutdown Time A LOT

I have a 15-inch MBP (2011) 2.3 GHz, Core i7 with 8 GB of memory and a Vertex 3 MAX IOPS SSD. I'm running Mac OS X Lion 10.7.4.As you can imagine, this is one quick system. When I first installed Lion (I did a clean install on a brand new SSD when Lion came out), my shutdown time was literally under half a second. Then a few days later, as I installed my usual apps, I noticed that the shutdown time suddenly went to 20 seconds with the usual grey screen and spinning wheel. I figured that one of my programs must be causing this, but could never figure out which.After living with this for months, I decided today to use Activity Monitor to try to quit some processes to see if my shutdown time would go down. After a few tries, I noticed that just starting and quitting Activity Monitor brings my shutdown time back to half a second..

I repeated this over a dozen times. I start my system and immediately shut it down: it takes 20 seconds to shutdown. Then I start it, run Activity Monitor and then immediately quit it, then shutdown: it takes half a second to shutdown.I can obviously live with a 20-second shutdown time. I don't shutdown often anyway and the system is super fast otherwise. But it's still nice to get to the bottom of this.

Info:
MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.4), 8 GB, 240 GB Vertex 3 MAX IOPS SSD