Why the Restoring process for Photos taking so long to restore using a new Monterey install

This question has been answered before in 2019, but the difference with me is that the progress bar never moves beyond 0% even if I leave it running for days. i do have 30,000 photos. but still something should happen. The photo library is sitting on my system drive.

When I start up photos in the new OSX Monterey, I get the following and it sits for hours without moving from 0%

I shut photos down, restarted and got the same.

I shut down the computer and restarted ... the same.

how can I fix this? thanks