I didnt read your description carefully.. apologies.  Point taken on
the labels, Amazon is an excellent example

I guess this boils down to my belief that progress meters are an
illusion.  A little trick designers can employ to comfort users in to
thinking things aren't stuck.  Borne out of the flaws of slow systems
- where user's needed feedback.

I do see a fundamental difference between a 'progress bar'  (extreme
example - but fundamentally this is what they are)
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex11/xpprogressbar.htm
and a stage indicator
http://www.webreference.com/programming/xul/amazon.png

I didnt realize before that your process can be stopped and picked up
over a number of days.  In that case I'd point towards some of the Tax
applications (TaxAct, Turbo tax etc).  I dont believe they use
progress meters - stand to be corrected on that.

If this was a straight forward flow I'd buy the requirement. But I
still have the question - why would users need a graphic to indicate
'progress' when the user is the dependency in terms of the time they
spend in your flows and the subroutines they may (or may not) choose.

Again, I may (hell.. probably) have misunderstood things but it sounds
like you need a navigation system that indicates the stages.  I have
in the past used a series of tabbed mini wizards... my aprroach here
would be to build the 'progress' in to the navigation.

regards- pauric
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