"Messages is updating..." after Sierra update

RJTUK,

Really appreciate the reply, this site is awesome - before posting a question, I was looking around for a while and it's cool to see so many people willing to help others.

Unfortunately, this didn't change anything. I renamed the folder, created a new one, restarted, and it's still hung up and just sitting there.

Man, this is beyond frustrating.

So I did everything in that thread. I first went through and tried the first post with the three different suggestions - then I followed the other post which had 5 separate steps, and then even tried the last suggestion.

Still no luck at all.

And yeah, my messages data is probably quite large, but I'd have zero issues with losing it all if it meant that Messages would function properly. The ability to respond to messages on my laptop is one of my favorite features, not sure I can tolerate not having it.

Have something interesting.. I started to think about what options or anything I may have changed with the new install. The only thing that I changed was I decided to use FileVault - for some reason, never had it activated previously.

Before, when loading up Messages, the progress bar was filled maybe a half an inch or so. Just for the **** of it, I turned it off, it restarted my computer, and now the progress bar is almost entirely full, except maybe a half inch from being entirely full.

Would this have any type of cause? It's currently decrypting now (14 minutes left) - figure I'll give it a restart after and see if that would do it? Then I can maybe turn it back on when I get it to finally work?

Total shot in the dark.

Just want to say again, thank you for spending the time to try and help.

After that, I watched the progress bar slowly load, got all excited and then it stopped right at the end before it was complete.

Sigh..

Update on my situation in case it may help someone: I turned off FileVault, that's when I started to actually see the progress bar load but stall at the end. I decided to try one more thing based off of someone else's post - I booted in safe mode, and restarted again. Frustrated after that didn't alter anything, as I saw the progress go up but then it just halted, I left the window open and moved it to the side.

Started browsing the internet and was convinced I needed to go to pick up a bigger external hard drive to save the stuff I needed to save. Everything that was imperative for me to save, I already have, but my old external is filled up entirely.

All of a sudden, I got a pop up message to log into Messages - I was like what on earth? And.. it worked. I have no idea how, but I went through all those steps and after almost an hour, the message popped up for me to login.

Thank you RJTUK for the assistance, I have no doubts you pointed me in the right direction to get this resolved. What the problem was exactly? Not sure at all, but it's working now.