How long are we talking about? And what sort of hardware specs are you working with (CPU, memory, available hard disk space)?
Aborting the patch window guarantees problems. That much is certain.
Well, I've got a AMD 5600+ dual core CPU and an 8800GTS GPU with 2 GB of 800MHz 5-5-5-12 RAM. And I was waiting for 10 minutes or so, with no change.
I reinstalled EasyTuTu today, however, and the patch installed in a different way. Very quick and a kind of progress bar made of dots went down the console. It didn't do this before. Now the aforesaid assertion error no longer occurs in character creation, so it was that the patching section got a little screwed up.
Thank you for the speedy reply, and can I must say that I prefer [.][.][.][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] style of loading bar (of course, a full installshield application is best) because it really does help to know how many dots there should be.