Excessive vibration in flexible structures is a problem encountered in many different fields, causing fatigue of structural components. Passive techniques, though sometimes limited in their capabilities, have been used in the past to attenuate vibrations. Recently active techniques have been developed to enhance vibration control performance beyond that provided by their passive counterparts. Most often, the focus of active control methods has been to suppress structure displacements. In cases where vibration results in structure failures, displacement suppression may not be the best choice of control approaches (it can, in fact, increase dynamic loads which would be even more harmful to supports) . This paper presents two optimal control methods for attenuating steady state vibrations in flexible structures. One method minimizes shaft displacements while another minimizes dynamic reaction forces. The two methods are applied to a model of a typical flexible structure system and their results are compared. It is found that displacement minimization can increase loads, while load minimization decreases loads.