Mt Lion has been downloading for two plus hours and hasn't shown any amount of the download in the elongated bubble

It is a very large file and depending on your internet connection, can take considerable time (hours......). You can open the Mac App Store > Purchases and should be able to see the progress of the download there.

FWIW, with my DSL connection, any download will get slower if I use the internet for anything else because that is using some of my available bandwidth. I can see the connection speed decrease every time I load a browser page.