Repairs come with two warnings:
This may take a long time
Cancelling the repair may cause problems
This leaves two questions unanswered:
How long is long? 5 hours? One day? 2 days?
How to cancel the repair
I have used the repairs successfully several times and I am impressed by this tool, but each time I have had to interrupt an excessively long repair. In the most recent, the MDAC/Jet repair ran for 16 hours. CPU activity fluctuated around 13% and there were occasional writes to disk. Thus there was no way to tell conclusively if the repair was in a loop. According to the rules I should have continued to wait - but 16 hours for one repair? As soon as I closed the repair logging window the repairs resumed and rapidly ran to conclusion. The MDAC repair showed as "done". Was this the right thing to do?
Is there a better way to prove that a repair is not going to finish? This has happened every time I ran the repairs, always when the window reported that output was suspended to speed the repair.