[clug] Fedora 3 security update kills Linux install

[Pearl Louis]

Well, just as the title says.  About 10 minutes ago I boot into Fedora
3.  Like a good little girl I go, "Well, what about security updates?"
 I run "yum update" and see *one* security update (for
selinux-policy-target I think).  Everything is running fine at this
point and has been for months.  Everything was running fine minutes
*before* I applied the security update.  No problems.  I install the
update.  Immediately after the update, everything goes to hell, quite
literally.  Everytime I try to run a program e.g. Matlab, Firefox I
get an error message similar to:

"error while loading shared libraries:/lib/tls/libc.so.6: cannot apply
additional memory protection after relocation: Permission denied."

OK, maybe selinux did something to my computer.  Reboot (yes, Windows
mentality).  Reboot fails giving me the same error message as above. 
I manually switch the machine on and off.  Go pass grub, it starts
uncompressing the kernel, then something about an audit comes up and
suddenly I get the error message above with the additional line,

"Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init."

Wow, I never thought a simple security update can quite literally kill
a Linux installation like this.  I've been using Linux for a couple of
years now (mostly Mandrake) and this has never happened before. 
Actually this has never happened with any security update I've applied
for anything before e.g. Windows.  I expect a bit of flakiness every
now and then or maybe some programs to stop working at worse which
will then require a few hours of swearing and troubleshooting but
actually *killing* the entire installation?  This has definitely put
me off Fedora bigtime.  I can't even apply a simple security update
without worrying about doing backups in case my entire Linux
installation goes poof.

Ah well, before I wipe Fedora off as a very bad experience, does
anyone have any idea how to potentially fix this problem?  Or at least
save my data?

Pearl