forums.wsusoffline.net

Hi is it possible to get any type of progress during this stage even if its to let you know it is doing something as sometimes an hour can pass and you don't know if its crashed or still doing something at all.....

Sorry to say, but: no
This process is complete done by the Windows Update Agent. You may try to parse C:\Windows\WindowsUpdate.log but everytime I tried to debug the slow search issue using that file, I didn't get any useful information.