Dock and finder not accessible after 10.5.8 update

I updated my aluminum imac through the software update last night, unaware that I had only a few GB free space on the hard drive.
Right after it restarted, it says the dock has crashed, and gives me the option of Ignore, Report(?), Relaunch. I select Relaunch but it's unresponsive.
I've tried restarting the machine normally and on safe mode but still the dock and finder/spotlight all crash at the very beginning, or right after I try to access it.
I've then tried verifying / repairing the disk and disk permissions, it says the volume appears to be OK, but still I encounter the same problems.
I know I have made several mistakes:
1. using "software update"
2. having insufficient hard drive space
3. no backup
I'm thinking if I am able to delete some things and free up about 10gb of space, the mac should be able to run?
Currently I am only able to access / delete things on my desktop, but there are only small files there.
How can I access other folders? Finder does not work for me... I've also tried just dragging files from the dock to the trash but it crashes the dock. I'm stumped!
Any help/enlightenment is appreciated!
P.S. I'd prefer not to bring it to the Genius bar for help because it's very heavy and hard to grab onto.

Nothing's changed after that. There's a couple of user accounts on the computer, and I tried deleting the com.apple.finder.plist in all of them. I've also restarted in Single User mode, and fsck-ed, put the computer into firewire target disk mode and run disk utility from another machine. No joy.

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