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.
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I simply wished to add the fact to the existing report that updating the java to OpenJDK 7 from OpenJDK 6 is a possible solution and that this is not caused by Mojang but by the java runtime. Since the original report is unresolved, perhaps this is the reason for the bug.
Also, this bug does not only happen on 1.7.4 but also on 1.7.9. Any version 1.7.4 and later. 1.7.4, 1.7.6, 1.7.8 and 1.7.9.
I'm not certain I'm clean on the purpose of this report. There are indeed other reports relating to issues with OpenJDK 6. If you are asking to have affected versions updated with 1.7.4, this cannot be done, as that version is no longer current.