[allenu]

Good on you. Most progress bars are about user experience and not so much about accuracy. People just want to know that there's a long sequence of work and that progress is being made.

It's often an illusion and showing too much how the sausage is made makes the user start asking questions about what's happening behind the scenes.

That said, a long task that is prone to failure due to external factors should definitely be conveyed in the progress bar. If a bad network connection is affecting a process from finishing, you obviously want the user to know that so they don't blame the software for being slow. :)