[hakfoo]

How about a progress bar that you can expand into a more itemized status presentation-- either a list of tasks or even a log of exactly the last task started and when it was done.

Itemizing individual steps allows users to reason about their performance characteristics, if well explained. These might cause jerkiness in the overall bar.

If I had a progress bar stuck at 27%, it would be valuable to click a little "view more" link and see "11:34 AM: begin downloading file 27/100: foo.tgz (62.3Gb)" I'd be more willing to expect to wait on it advancing than if it was a 30k file.