Importing mail from Panther to Tiger

I'm doing a standard upgrade from 10.3.9 to 10.4.3. All has gone smoothly. Opened Mail for the first time under Tiger. It immediately started importing my messages from Panther Mail. But it's been running for 6 hours so far.
This is on a G3 Powerbook. I'm guessing I have 50,000 - 100,000 emails in Mail, spread amongst perhaps 150 mailboxes. Could the upgrade process simply be taking a great deal of time, or is there some other problem?
The "busy" bar continues to swirl in the application. It doesn't appear to have died.
Thanks.
Powerbook   Mac OS X (10.4.3)  

The same thing is happening to me after going from Panther to 10.4.4.
Did you ever figure out what was going on or how to fix it?

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    I am attempting to import mailboxes from one Mac operating on Panther to a new Mac Mini operating on Tiger. The directions simply say to go to "import mailboxes" which I have done. The folders show up in my new Mail however they are all empty. Of course, they are not empty on my Panther OS. Any solutions?

    I don't know what is it that you've tried, but there are a few things you should be aware of. First of all, the conversion from Mail 1.x to Mail 2.0 is broken. Take a look at this thread to better understand the problem:
    Help! "You need to take this account online in order to download it."
    Now, the easiest way to bring your mail from the old machine to the new one would be to just copy the HOME/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist preferences file and the HOME/Library/Mail folder from the old machine into the same location on the new machine. Note, however, that, depending how do you transfer the files from one machine to the other, file ownership of those files can be messed up and Disk Utility won't be able to fix that afterwards. For best results, whatever you do, be sure you do it from the new machine and while logged in as the user that's going to use those files in that machine.
    When launching Mail on the new machine, Mail should realize that the mail database has to be converted to the new format used by Mail 2.0 and should proceed to import all your mailboxes. If you want this to succeed, be sure you've read the thread I've provided a link to above, and tidy up your mailboxes in Panther before attempting to import them in Tiger.
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    OK, I have 15 email accounts in my Mail, that worked fine, albeit slowly, in Panther (10.3.9).
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    The real issue here is that the conversion from Mail 1.x to Mail 2.x is broken and it may fail miserably even for mailboxes that Mail 1.x could handle without a hitch. Hence, trying to “fix” any problems you might have in Mail 1.x by upgrading to Mac OS X 10.4 is guaranteed to fail and can only make things worse.
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