MBP stuck on blue screen with spinning loading icon during update to 10.6.7

I have a mid-2010 model Macbook Pro 13inch, 2.4ghz/4gb ram
I've been scouring apple forums and even reddit and my googlefu has yielded no such luck. Basically, System Update has been yelling at me for a few weeks now to upgrade to 10.6.7 (among other updates) and I've been putting it off and putting it off, with the intention of eventually doing the update, but I just kept forgetting.
Finally tonight, I remembered, and decided to open System Update, and do all the recommended updates that it was asking me to do. So, without thinking twice (I've never had an issue with this before) I clicked download and install, and away it went, downloading like usual and then rebooting.
Thing is, it's been stuck at this blue screen with the spinning spiral coming up on 5 hours now. I know the 10.6.7 update was close to 400mb, but I've never had anything like this happen before.
My hard drive had more than 150 gigs free on it last time I checked, and it's been running absolutely flawless up until now.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is it supposed to take so long? What do I do?
I've been contemplating shutting it down by holding the power button, but since it's a OS update I'm afraid the drive will be corrupted, and unfortunately I don't have a current backup of the drive either... Help

I left my macbook plugged in over night, we're now going on 14 hours of this blue screen with the spinning wheel/symbol. Anyone?

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2. The Mac OS X start-up screen appears with the progress bar
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Brannas...
Empty,Blue Screen.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106464
1. Start up in Safe Mode.(shift key at startup)
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b. Drag the Fonts folder from ~/Library/Fonts to the desktop.
b. Restart the computer in Mac OS X.
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2. Remove incompatible third-party startup items.
a. Start up in Safe Mode.(shift at startup)
b. Open the Mac OS X hard disk.
c. Drag third-party items out of ....
/Library/StartupItems .......
/System/Library/StartupItems ...
Place them on the desktop .... If you're unsure whether an item is a third-party item or an Apple-installed item, don't move it.
d.Restart the computer.
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3. If your computer still starts up to a blue screen, follow these steps.
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b. Type: mount -uw /
c. Press Return.
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mv /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist preferences2.old
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e. Press Return.
f. Type:
mv /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist preferences3.old
g. Press Return.
h. Type: reboot
i. Press Return.
4. Reset certain privileges.
a. Start up the computer in Single-User Mode.
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c. Type: mount -uw /
d. Press Return.
e. Type: chmod 1775 /
f . Press Return.
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h. Press Return.
george

MBP stuck on blue screen with spinning loading icon during update to 10.6.7

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