There were no lookups involved in the packages I was working on at the time.

No deadlocks were shown in sp_who2 when the packages hung.

I could not find any thing in the SQL server itself that explained it.

That first master/multiple child package model was not successful in time so that was scrapped for that particular project and we went with a pure TSQL ETL process.

In the simplier ones since then, I had to avoid using distributed transactions, and used SQL transactions with a common connection held throughout the package so it could roll back .

This is going back a bit, I do not think SP2 was installed at the time.

I never found the root cause for for the hanging.

Hope that helps.