There are a few solutions to this problem.

1) just wait for it to finish.

2) temporarily disable some of your repos. if you're not installing something from a repo, have it disabled. The development repo especially, (since it is quite large) seems to choke the device. Ovi store repo also seems to slow it down.

3) use fapman. http://maemo.org/packages/view/fapman/ it works very well, but it will report errors sometimes.

4) use the terminal and apt-get. It's the fastest way to update, upgrade or install.