Fedora 16, Dell XPS15 Boot Issue, Multiple Start Failures

[sidx64]

Hi guys,
I have used F16 for a long time on this laptop, and it has worked well.
Recently, I decided to upgrade to f17, but F17 gave a lot of issues and forced me to go back to f16.

Now, I fresh installed f16, alongside my Mint 13 installation.

It went well. Everything worked. I made some changes to fstab and sudoers files. Then I did a yum update. It updated 420 files (around 200 to 300 MB got downloaded.)

The update was completed without errors.

However, When I rebooted to the new kernel, (3.4.4)
Multiple startup failures came up. Services such as "Sendmail" "Network Manager" and others gave red [FAILED] statuses.

Also, starting of Display Manager was attempted multiple times, and its weird to explain. Here's a copy of the boot log

[http] pastebin [dot] com / 5PDekeUJ

The same happened when I tried to boot into the previous kernel.

Any ideas? Please help!



---------------------------------------EDIT-----------------------------------------
Further Info


I have been trying to find out where its going wrong, and here is what I found

1. Frustrated with it all and not finding an answer, I re installed f16 - fresh, clean.
2. I updated like last time. 132 MB downloaded as delta, and then some 60MB more was downloaded as packages.
3. I restarted, expecting to find myself stuck like last time. It worked fine.
4. Then, I proceeded to make some changes as usual. I can remember doing the following: I installed the codecs and stuff, made changes to fstab, (added ntfs partitions), installed Ailirus and installed eclipse, netbeans and some other software via that. Went to extensions.gnome.org and added my favorite extensions. made ailirus add sudo options. used xbacklight to auto reduce brightness to 0%, in the /etc/gdm/Init/default file. Thats about it. I can't remember what Else i installed, but when I rebooted, once again, I am stuck.
5. I also installed Bumblebee (My laptop is Optimus based) But that is not the problem I think, because in the previous problem, (before fresh re install) I had not installed Bumblebee.

Stuck once more.

But with changes.

This time, Im not stuck in the boot messages. The gnome display manager starts up, and is stuck at this point:
The screen brightness reduces as expected, and the screen goes blank, and the mouse circle (waiting or working) mouse symbol shows up at the bottom right corner.

And thats it. I can move the waiting ball mouse pointer with my touchpad, but no use. NOTHING else ever happens. No login screen. No nothing.I am able to go to other ttys by ctrl+alt+F2 and all, but gdm is stuck there.

The boot messages are the same as last time.

I tried to use recovery mode of the earlier kernel, and it dropped me to the terminal. but there too, gdm acted the same way.
here is the boot log of the recovery attempt. [FedoraForum is restricting the no. of URLs i can put here, sorry for the inconvenience]

[http://] pastebin [dot] com / 2ZVUNYgV

Can someone please help? I haven't the slightest idea why this is happening.. I do not want to re install after having worked so long to configure it just like i want it