MDT 2012 Deployment Workbench cannot genererate catalog for any images

Question

It just hangs generating a catalog for the operating system (Windows 7 64-bit) and says it "could take a long time."
I have tried with multiple images.
I have waited a long time (more than 30 minutes) and the progress bar will not move.
I click Stop Execution and it tries to stop, but doesn't compete the process of stopping.
The only way to get out of it is to use task manager to force it to quit.  Then the Deployment Workbench will no longer load until the entire server is restarted.
How can this be fixed?

Answer 1

If you're storing the image on a filer, it can take a bit sometimes to process a catalog file. If you're really curious what the heck it's doing and think it's frozen -- because I've gotten into the same place and thought what is this thing doing?? Check
the logfile it generates at %temp%\Microsoft.BDD.Catalog.log .  It doesn't log much but will log progress for you. 
Also, the image needs to be open for a catalog to be created.  It will mount it in the same %temp% directory, under a long path named after the tasksequence ID.  That error you saw when on another account was most likely that the WIM you were building
a catalog for was already mounted, or the mount was corrupted at that point.  To resolve an error like that in the future -
1. dism /get-mountedwiminfo -- note the really long pathed image mounted to the temp directory.
2. dism /unmount-wim /mountdir:%TEMP%\whateverthefolderis /discard
3. Retry catalog creation.  Usually any errors during catalog creation will be from a stale image or image in use.  Checking /get-mountedwiminfo will often tell you right away if there's an issue and mark the status : Needs Remount. 
Best bet with creating catalogs, watch the bdd catalog log in temp and just don't touch anything else for 15-60mins depending on network latency.  Hope this helps.
Ryan