MacBook won't restart

I noticed my computer was very slow to restart after updating. At the moment it is a bit sluggish loading some apps. Hopefully this is only temporary.

Before "pulling the plug", try to force a shutdown:

1. Press the power button on the computer for six seconds to shut down the computer.
2. Wait 10 seconds, and then turn on the computer.

Mine behaved similarly after the Airport Update. After pressing restart the MacBook shut down and then restarted. However, it would show a black screen and never go any further. Not even a beachball appeared. Even forcing shutdown and restarting was to no avail. Only zapping PRAM allowed it to start up again. After that an attempt at restart once more got the black screen. Backlight on, but no activity even after five minutes.

I finally appear to have it functioning correctly by zapping PRAM and then reselecting the startup disc in system preferences and letting the system restart from the preference panel's restart button.

Oops! Shutdown and restart once more resulted in a MacBook stuck on a black screen until forced off and restarted with a PRAM zap. So that wasn't the solution.

However, downloading the stand alone Airport Express updater for my build and reapplying the updater seems to have fixed things back up. I have now shut down and restarted successfully twice.

Wrong again. Ran into the black screen on restart once more.

Okay... Remembering the fix for the vertical color lines bug (a sign that the OS has munged PRAM storage), I opened the displays preference pane, changed resolutions and colors to something else and then back. Thus far can restart. Really odd effects this update had. I also had my Camino bookmarks file munged.

this does not look good. Im also stuck at the black screen.

I've had the same problem and posted another thread last night here:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=655780&tstart=0

I am new to OS X. Is there a way to "undo" the software update from yesterday? My system was working fine. Now I'm scared to restart!

PD