Won't boot, hangs on blue screen

i was doing a software update of a bunch of things and the system ended up hanging for a very long time so i did a hard restart. when i turned it back on it went on very slowly, and got hung up at a blue screen.
i did another hard restart and it came on (slowly) but when the desktop loaded it only loaded the dock, and kept having an error dialog box pop up that said that 'Spotlight' was not loading, i could try again, ignore, etc.
i am now running the disk utility from the start up disk to check the hard drive. its possible this is getting hung up as well.
originally i came to here to see if there was a way to reinstall spotlight from the install disk. but with the disk verify getting hung up i'm a little worried. any thoughts?

You interrupted an installation in progress. This is bad news. You should always give it all the time it needs. Unless you have a Time Machine backup or a clone on an external drive, you might have to reinstall from the DVD. (And if you don't have either, it's time to consider getting some kind of backup. I would never do a major update without knowing I can revert to the backup if necessary.) In !0.6 this should preserve your settings and apps. When you are finished, install the 10.6.4 Combo Update.
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1048?viewlocale=en_US
But before you do that, you might see if you can get it to boot in Safe Mode by holding down the shift key at startup. This will take much longer than a usual booup; it's doing some checking and repairing, so give it time. If you are able to boot in Safe Mode, repair Permissions from Disk Utility in Applications > Utilities.
And it sounds like the system might have been choking on too many updates. I generally only use Software Update to see what's available. Then, if I want to do an update, I find the standalone at apple downloads and, if I'm doing several updates, I only install them one by one.

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