Xbox 360 March Update Screwed my System

This month Microsoft released a MANDATORY update for the Xbox 360 via Xbox Live and I downloaded it right after receiving the notice. Well, today, as Spring Break starts, I finally got around to playing my 360 for the first time since I updated it last week. Now my 360 is locking up every 5 minutes, usually before I can even get a race started in Burnout Revenge.

I'm pretty mad about this and I went online to see if I could figure out what was wrong. It looks like others are having the same issue according to this thread on the Gaming-Age forums, and this thread on the Xbox.com forums. In fact, the problem seems to be pretty big.

I know that I'll probably be able to get this fixed for free, but stuff like this shouldn't happen. I shouldn't have to send my 360 to Microsoft during Spring Break (the only time during the semester I'll be able to play) just because they didn't test their update very well for issues.