Problem solved.
The problem: I tried several times over a period of several days to create a 20 gig truecrypt volume. The volume was taking an absurdly long period of time to create. I tried making smaller volumes that were only a few gigabytes big. Truecrypt would originally estimate 30 minutes but as it encrypted the volume it would process less and less data per minute until the 30 minute prediction turned into hours.
Solution: I increased my partition size.
Explanation: When I first became frustrated with truecrypt I had a 100 gigabyte partition for Ubuntu. On that partition I did install a 20 gig truecrypt volume but it took me nearly 24 hours to do it. Recently, I reformatted my hard drive and this time around, as you can see from subsequent posts, I partitioned 320 gigabytes for Ubuntu. Having done that I tried truecrypt again several times and appeared to encounter the same problem. After several days I posted here to see if I could find a solution that didn't require me quarantining my computer for a day. After posting I decided I would just let truecrypt run and give up my computer for a day but it turned out that despite predicting an ever increasingly distant ETA at the beginning of the encrypting, the speed picked up again and it worked. The problem, I think, was that I didn't give tc enough time and I perceived the problem to still exist when in fact if I would have allowed the encrypting to continue it would have become apparent that increasing the partition size had worked.
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