FC6 Upgrade Hangs on "Preparing transaction from installation source"

[Pete Pinter]

On arguably the world's smallest production server - an 8 year old
Compaq laptop (Pentium MMX @166Mhz and 140MB RAM) happily running FC5
serving web/email/mysql/etc., the upgrade to FC6 has seemingly stalled
early during package installation.

It took an hour to get past the documented 'No Handler ...
yum.YumBase' bogosity, but it eventually continued, prompting for CDs
1 through 5 before hanging at the point indicating 0% completion
during Processing - "Preparing transaction from installation source".

I've waited over two hours now, with no discernible disk activity. Is
there anything I can do here, or am I looking at regressing back to
FC5?

I couldn't find any minimum system requirements for FC6 that
disqualified this museum piece from upgrading and I would really like
to stay current, if at all possible.