Trouble importing from Blogger – gets stuck

I have the new site set up just fine, but I am trying to import from Blogger – there are over 600 posts on the Blogger site and 1800 comments.
The Blogger Importer starts to run but then sticks after 5 posts and goes no further. If I come out and restart it will do another 5 then stop – and so on. I’ll go mad before I get to 600!

I read that you could get better results if you first imported the Blogger data into WordPress.com, so I did this just fine and all the posts and comments came over easily into WordPress.com and the new WordPress.com site looks perfect. So I produced an export file from there and tried to import that into the new www.remarpro.com site with the WordPress importer.

However this has only imported just over 100 posts of the 600, and I get many many failed to import messages for the other posts. The file uploads OK then when I set the author, up come all these failed to import messages. The older posts come across OK, but it then fails at some point and nothing comes after that date.

I’ve tried both methods several times and am not making any further progress getting the other posts imported.

Does anyone have any further suggestions please? I heard that its possible for WordPress staff to get the stuck Blogger import to work – anyone know about this?
Thank you
Deby