Constant pin wheel of death after installin iTunes 10.1

Someone please help me. I'm about to throw my mb pro off a bridge. I bought it about a year ago, and everything has been working very smoothly up until around yesterday when I installed iTunes 10.1. I'm currently in the Philippines, so the update took more than usual, which I expected. I've installed several updates while being here and they've all taken some time, but worked out fine in the end none the less. This time, it showed one bar that was probably around 99% with the usual hard drive icon by the loading bar and said it was registering something. I can't quite remember what it was. Anyway, this portion of the installation eventually froze which I wasn't too worried about; i mean these things happen. So the download finished after what seemed like forever but also remained frozen; except the download window. I restarted my laptop and the apple symbol came up but remained in the page for an unusually long period of time, followed by the spinny animation indicating something was loading. It now always does this for 5 minutes at the least each time I restate my computer. And when I does finall load, I try firing up firefox or iTunes and I get around 3 minutes of smooth browsing/working computer then the dreaded pin wheel comes up and stays up. Even the reliable 'cmd option esc' doesn't respond. Can anyone suggest anything to fix this? Takeobg it to an Apple genius is at the top of my list, but the closest time I'll be able to get to one is December 3rd, when I get back from my trip. If worse comes to worst, I backed up my hd before I left on my time capsule, but I'm hoping it doesn't have to come to that. I'm running v 10.6.3 currently.