apt-get update hanging twice (work-around included)

[livanti21]

Sorry, I accidentally deleted the content of my prior post, because I did not understand how the reply editor worked.
So I deleted the entire post as what was left was not helpful.  (Was there a way to go back to prior versions?)

So here is synopsis without all the nice details I had in the prior post.

I was doing a fresh install of Mobian to the EMMC.
I did an apt update and apt upgrade

and it got stuck at 7% for 20 hours.  Reading elsewhere I found people running into a similar issue and identify a system control restart command related to fstrim as the problem.  I killed the systemctl restart process related to fstrim

The process continued a little bit and exited.

I did another

apt upgrade

It got to 88% and got stuck again.

I killed another systemctl restart process this time related to something else.

This time the apt upgrade continued to completion.

I re-ran
apt upgrade
and
dpkg --configure -a

just to make sure everything was okay, and everything was okay.

I think in both hang cases there was also a process related to something about dialog.

Perhaps the upgrade was asking something that did not appear on the screen?

I ran the entire process once on the phone via Kings Cross and once via SSH using a screen session.

So I tried to update and upgrade this morning and it got stuck and I rebooted the phone. I then had to run dpkg --configure -a because it was interrupted but running it it gets stuck at 'Setting up apt (2.1.8) and will do nothing else.

Do you have any ideas that could possibly help me?