yum appears broken
 

I don't know what to do about this. I've never seen yum not work. This happened because I was trying to figure out a way for Netflix to work in Fedora 17.

If you take the time to ask a question then you should also take the time to share whatever it is you did to fix it. Other than that F17 is EOL.

fedora 17 is a dead version

you might as well uninstall yum
there are and never will be any updates to fedora 17


Please stay current and install Fedora 19
or in January / February install Fedora 20

netflix needs Microsoft's "silverlight" and Microsoft's "DotNet Framwork "
preferably running on Microsoft's Windows 7 or 8.1

now
there is an custom built hack using the microsoft version of firefox running in wine
with DotNet installed and silverlight
it might still work

see
-- fedora 19 instructions
http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=286230

but fedora 17 is dead and unsupported
the instructions are for fedora 19
http://sourceforge.net/projects/postinstaller/

In the .png it looks like that pipelight.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d appears to have some issues. I would remove it from the directory and do a 'yum clean all' after that. If something else kicks out, add it to the thread.