OK, if someone told me this story, I'd assume he was a real beginner, but here goes. Would anyone like to take a stab at explaining the following coincidences?

I created and tested an engine yesterday afternoon that goes through about 6 or 7 steps on two large tables. 1G apiece, 1:M, parent has 4 million records, child has 8 million.

I tested and debugged the engine on a 100 record set, made sure it ran through to the end, did everything right, etc. Then I set it running and left for the night, expecting each step to take from 10 minutes to an hour or so.

Here's the strange thing, boiled down to the detail:
1. When I came in, it had been running for 10 hours on one step.
2. I brought up the task manager and saw that it was "Not Responding," but while I was contemplating losing a day's work it switched to "Running." So I figure it is running as planned, though taking a lot more time than I thought it should.
3. An hour later I realized I hadn't checked the performance meter, and did so. There was no disk activity. So now I figure it is *not* really doing anything, and begin to contemplate cancelling it.
4. Concluding it was not actually doing anything, I cleared the task manager and suddenly it went to the next step?

What I can't figure is:
1. Was it "stuck" when I was gone (hence the "not responding" by task manager), is such a thing possible, cuz it ain't as far as I know.
2. Is there any way that killing the task manager would have "un-stuck" it, or was this a major coincidence?

This is a newly installed NT 4, SP 4, VFP 6 (no SP 3 on this machine yet). The "engine" is on a top-level form called from another form, which will be converted to an out-of-process server once I've run it a few times and am comfortable with it.

As always, TIA...