Bad crash during FC10/FC11 startup. screen appears to blink some errors codes before death.

[ron flory]

Following recent updates (2..3 weeks ago), a reboot of FC10 resulted in 
a hard crash right after 'S99local' is processed.

The error messages seemed to implicate yum.updatesd and yum.config, and 
also appeared to suggest a syntax error (dispaying a lines of usage info).

 The crash was very unusual in that the entire screen blinked many 
times, reminiscent of old-style numeric bios beep codes.  It blinked 
just a bit fast for me to count the numbers, which appears to be maybe 6 
digits?

 I thought an upgrade to FC11 might fix it- bad idea, it didn't.  I can 
still get in with Rescue DVD in order to backup my data, but I'd prefer 
to repair the install rather than start over.

 HW is a few-years-old 900Mhz AMD system, pretty generic, plus old SCSI 
card (for page scanner only).

 Anybody seen anything like this recently?

ron