Stuck at "Scanning for Steam Game Updates"

Like a lot of you guys, I've had troubles after the recent big update.

Unlike a lot of people, I've had no luck fixing the problem after experimenting with deleting:
* Steam.dll
* SteamUI.dll
* ClientRegistry.Blob

I was downloading a big update for TF2, a few days back, when my computer rebooted somewhere during or directly after the download process.

Now when I go to start up TF2, I log in to Steam okay, but it gets stuck at the next phase. It gets stuck at "Scanning for Steam Game Updates".

It doesn't update. And if I just leave it on, unsuccessfully trying, all that happens is that the Steam text file log gets bigger and bigger (as it logs its Steam jibberish), to the point where I have to delete it.

Any help would be so cool.