Kdar installed by Yast on Suse 10 GM seems to have zipped
and written all requested files in /home.

The progress bar moved all the way to 100% and then nothing
changed.

Kdar does not give me any options except cancel which has been
there since the beginning. The mod on another forum
had given the best
analysis I have heard thusfar suggesting that perhaps
something was trying to write somewhere where it did not
have permission. So I went to /home as root and did
chmod -R 2774 /home. All file permissions now look wide
open for root or the user who was trying to do the backup.

Kdar is still using user cpu which fluctuates most of the
time over the 94% level.

Was chmod -R 2774 /home a wise thing to do?

Does kdar need a huge amount of time on the last disk to write
a summary? Is it abnormal behaviour?
How long do you think I should let it continue like this?
What do you think I should do next?

Maybe your harddrive is getting full?
I recognized that the compression takes a lot of time. It is helpful to exclude already compressed files like e.g. jpg, gz and mp3 files. I could reduce time significantly by doing this.
Did you also exclude the directory where you store the archives from the backup? Otherwise you may get into an indefinite loop.
When you look at the CPU usage, can you see a sub-process of kdar that may cause the freeze? I don't know if top has this option, but you can see the process tree in ksysguard.

Great advice abisk,
I was not feeling well. I thought about excluding the archive dir but then
dismissed it thinking surely dar will do that itself.

Actually, KDar does exclude it automatically, but if you play around with the settings, you may accidentally remove this option.

I didn't change any settings. But I did cancel exclude
some things then rerun. I wanted to restart but everything
seemed in place so I just let kdar go as is. Thanks for
the help. If you want to send this to kdar developers please
do so. I have never had any luck reporting errors in kde.