One other question -- How sure are you that the rebuild "stops" at a certain point? It can take hours to rebuild a large database. If you're doing other things with the computer, accessing the disk and sucking up CPU, the rebuild can appear to stall. It's been my experience that the rebuild ought to be the primary thing the computer is doing -- if you can shut down Photoshop and email and web browsers, does the database rebuild still "hang"?