portupgrade, pkgdb hang

[Robert S]

I am a newcomer to freebsd and am still trying to get to grips with
package management.

When I try to do a binary upgrade of a package it hangs.  Recently I
tried to upgrade sylpheed-claws and nothing happened for 2 hours.  I
got the following message:

# portupgrade -v -P sylpheed-claws
--->  Session started at: Sat, 28 May 2005 08:53:35 +0000
[Updating the pkgdb <format:bdb1_btree> in /var/db/pkg ... - 260
packages found (-1 +7) (...)

I get similar behaviour when I try to do pkgdb -F

I am running through a proxy and have
PACKAGESITE="ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5-stable/Latest/"
in my /etc/profile

I assume that I'm doing something wrong.  Can somebody help?