I don't know if this is the problem, but you can run it with "--rebuild" which will delete the database and start over from scratch (Bitcoin-Qt DB will still be there, so it will only take 1-2 hours to do a rebuild). I'm curious if doing a full rebuild fixes it for you. So far, I haven't seen any one need it yet, but if you have no other choice, you should try it.
Seems to do the job for me. Tried 50 times before and always stuck at 1%. Now already at 3% after 3 min. Thanks for the advice.
Thanks for identifying how much more work I have to do to get this version stable