Macbook won't boot after ime Machine restore

I powered my laptop on last night and it would not boot. It just sits at the Apple log and spinning disc. I tried the usual recovery options fsck, disk utility, verify disk, etc. They all failed with different errors.
I tried restoring my Mac by booting with the Install DVD and pressing C. When it came up I tried restoring from Time Machine backup (not sure the exact name) It allowed me to select my Time Machine backup drive and proceeded to restore. It said the restore was successful and I needed to reboot.
After reboot it does the same thing. It won't boot.
Additional information: I have also tried a fresh install and it works fine, but then it won't see my Time Machine data to restore from. I figure this eliminates the hard drive as a suspect, and points to Time Machine being hosed up.
The laptop had not been restarted for about two weeks and I know there has been at least one Update since that time. Is it possible that the update broke it and as soon as I restarted it loaded the new broken files? And is it possible that my Time Machine restore is just restoring these broken files?

Yes, thanks this is all helpful information.
I tried restoring to older restore points and the TM restores work fine and the Mac boots up ok. I had to restore three more times to find the most recent backup that would still boot up ok.
Lesson learned here is to make a mental note of when updates are applied as well as when the laptop has been rebooted.
Now I still have two problems.
1. The backup drive only has 11GB free space so I can't really archive the old backup in case something was missed. Any unless I am missing something I can't search the TM backup for ALL files modified after a certain date and then copy them over. This means that I have to browse folder by folder looking for new files and copy them over BEFORE wiping out the old backup and starting a new backup again.
2. TM over WiFi is VERY slow and it will take 3-4 days to get the new backup completed. This makes me nervous knowing I have to delete my existing good backup to make room for the new backup to begin. What if TM fails or some other bad luck happens before the backup is complete.
I guess my big question here is whether there is an easy way of backing up TM connected via USB then move the drive to my APE and continue using WiFi. Last time I looked into this you had to make a copy of the sparse file and modify it. Once again this does not work because there is not enough space for TWO full backups of a 300GB drive with about 200GB of data. I have over 1TB of drives being used for backups of other computers so it's not like I am being cheap and just don't have the space. I have a 500GB for my desktop backup, a 320 for my laptop backup and a 120 for my other laptop backup. guess I could just go throw more money at it and get two 1TB drives so one could be the local backup of all these computers and have the other at an off site location using CrashPlan to also backup all the drives.

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