Fedora :: Update Broke Computer - System Locked Up

Wednesday I went to work, docked and fired up my older Dell C840 laptop (running Fedora 12). It had a long list of updates that it downloaded and installed (it had been off for about a week). When the updates were finished, I noticed that my laptop had locked up. After waiting a while, I ended up doing a cold reboot. After that, I get the Fedora symbol that fills up, and then the screen goes black with a single cursor. You can type in anything and it is reflected- even control and ALT codes. If you hit CTL- ALT-F2, it goes into a terminal mode. You can do almost anything that you'd normally do in terminal mode. The video driver is the original off the install disk, and it's never been changed- it works fine right out of the box.

If I try to start up X-Windows, I get a segmentation fault error. I've tried deleting and then re-installing some of the packages that were updated (trying this via yum), no difference. I don't know what else to do. I need to get this laptop going before next week- it's my work computer and I do use it a lot. Is there any way to get in touch with the people who wrote the updates, and file a bug report? I'm using my main (home) system right now, that for a couple of reasons needs to stay on windoze XP for a few more weeks. I've been around computers for years, but not Linux.