forever Initializing when Installing Drupal 6

It has been several months but I've installed different versions of Drupal in about 7 domains. However, installing the 6.0 release hasn't been successful for me.

I initially tried updating from a beta version of 6.0b3. When I followed the update procedure and SEEMED to have successesfully completed the process except that Status Report still kept complaining that "Some modules have database schema updates to install." This 'schema update" complaint persisted after multiple attempts to update the databases. I only had core modules installed from the beta versions.

So then I tried deleting the databases, all the Drupal directories and tried re-installing from scratch. I re-uploaded freshly extracted files from drupal-6.0.tar.gz, set the write permissions for the Site directories and files, created a new MySQL database and ran the install. I selected English and ran put in the database information (including the non- LocalHost server).

The progress window said the following were complete:
Choose Language
Verify Requirements
Set up database

But the installer has sat on Install site with the progress bar (barberpole) turning for over 2 hours on each of the 3 attempts. If I break out of the install page,

Trying to rerun update.php gives:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function filter_xss_bad_protocol() in /usr/www/users/...../includes/common.inc on line 888

Selecting English when rerunning install.php gives:

user warning: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ') ORDER BY fit DESC LIMIT 0, 1' at line 1 query: SELECT * FROM menu_router WHERE path IN () ORDER BY fit DESC LIMIT 0, 1 in /usr/www/users/...../includes/menu.inc on line 316.
user warning: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ') ORDER BY fit DESC LIMIT 0, 1' at line 1 query: SELECT * FROM menu_router WHERE path IN () ORDER BY fit DESC LIMIT 0, 1 in /usr/www/users/...../includes/menu.inc on line 316.

Status MyPHPadmin 2.11.4
MySQL 5.0.45
PHP 5.2.5
Apache 2.2.4
FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p1

It appears that the database creation was successful but that's hard to tell without a list of the properly created tables and number of records. This is what MyPHPadmin said had been created:

Rec Tables
=== ==================
0     access
0     actions
0     actions_aid
0     authmap
1     batch
3     blocks
0     blocks_roles
0     boxes
0     cache
0     cache_block
0     cache_filter
0     cache_form
0     cache_menu
0     cache_page
0     comments
0     files
7     filters
2     filter_formats
0     flood
0     history
0     menu_links
0     menu_router
0     node
1     node_access
0     node_comment_statistics
0     node_counter
0     node_revisions
0     node_type
2     permission
2     role
1     sessions
39   system
0     term_data
0     term_hierarchy
0     term_node
0     term_relation
0     term_synonym
0     url_alias
2     users
0     users_roles
5     variable
0     vocabulary
0     vocabulary_node_types
==   =========================
65   43 table(s)

Any suggestions for my next step in troubleshooting?