There is an existing bug report I found that effected me. When versions past 1.7.2 were installed they could only be used once, then minecraft would have to be reinstalled.

I found for me this issue was caused by OpenJDK 6 where I had to upgrade it to OpenJDK 7. I had to make sure to uninstall the OpenJDK 6 runtime as OpenJDK 7 tried to use it. This resolved the issue for me.

It has also been suggested to replace OpenJDK with Sun's Java but this would simply do the same thing, upgrading from 6 to 7.

Unfortunately I don't have the error log anymore since I had to delete my .minecraft folder to get it to work. I hope you can find the existing bug report this is for and update the comments.

Your "affects Version/s" is fubar since it won't let me do 1.7.4 or 1.7.4+. Hopefully you can figure it out.