The Yamabe invariant is an invariant of a closed smooth manifold
defined using conformal geometry and the scalar curvature. Recently,
Petean showed that the Yamabe invariant is nonnegative for all closed
simply connected manifolds of dimension $\ge 5$. We extend this to
show that Yamabe invariant is nonnegative for all closed manifolds of
dimension $\ge 5$ with fundamental group of odd order having all Sylow
subgroups abelian. The main new geometric input is a way of studying
the Yamabe invariant on Toda brackets. A similar method of proof
shows that all closed oriented manifolds of dimension $\ge 5$ with
non-spin universal cover, with finite fundamental group having all
Sylow subgroups elementary abelian, admit metrics of \psc, once one
restricts to the ``complement'' of manifolds whose homology classes
are ``toral.'' The exceptional toral homology classes only exist in
dimensions not exceeding the ``rank'' of the fundamental group, so
this proves important cases of the Gromov-Lawson-Rosenberg Conjecture
once the dimension is sufficiently large.