Flushing drives

[Jenny Charlene]

And not in the toilet!

I have a loopback encrypted partition that I keep my email and such on,
but Evolution doesn't seems to leave some data in the buffer, so I have
to log out to and re-login to unmount it. Not a problem if I'm shutting
down the machine, but annoying if I'm not.

System is RH8, so I was wondering if someone knew a command that would
force the system to write out any data, and "unbusy" the partition, so
it'll dismount. I'm using "umount -d" already, but it's not doing what I
want. The "-f" option as root doesn't seem to work either. 
-- 
C-ya,
Jenny