After Lion upgrade, my email has been upgrading for 4+ hours

Question

Is this normal?
I installed the Lion upgrade on my mid-2009 MBP. It went without any complaints. I have 8G of RAM and 200G free on the HD.
When I restarted after the install, logged in and started mail.app it said it had to 'Optimize' it and it started this process.
It has been running for > 4 hours so far. The window shows no indication of any progress being made and says it will take a few minutes.
The timestamp on my Envelope Index in ~/Library/Mail matches the start of that process, but nothing else in there shows any change.
Looking in the console I see the startup messages for the process, but no errors.
10/13/11 7:59:08.506 AM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501: ([0x0-0x124124].com.apple.mail[33082]) Exited with code: 255
10/13/11 7:59:11.786 AM Mail: Using V1 Layout
10/13/11 7:59:13.653 AM Mail: Upgrading Library from 4.93 to 4.93
I can see that process is consuming CPU time and I did an lsof on the mail process and it shows that as the only open file under ~/Library/Mail that it has open.
mystic:~ jrh$ ps ax|grep Mail|grep -v grep
33118   ??  S      2:45.72 /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail -psn_0_1200421
mystic:~ jrh$ lsof -p 33118|grep /Library/Mail
Mail    33118  jrh    7u     REG               14,2  91271168  370870 /Users/jrh/Library/Mail/Envelope Index
Sizewise ~/Library/Mail is 16G in size.
How long should this process take? I'm closing in on 5 hours with mail shut down.
thanks
john

Answer 1

I had the same experience and after 20 minutes I did it the crazy way.  I disconnected it from USB iTunes and after 2 or 3 reconnections it happened the restore was ended and it was all OK.
Be carefull: this is something to recomended by Apple but... what can you do. ???