Klorance --
It sounds as though you have really had an awful time of it. I can completely relate, and have delt with distracting myself from nasty DVT medical treatments through gaming also. It really is aggrivating when you are trying to get something to work and it just sticks.
You said when you are installing mods -- I am thinking you mean fan-created mods? If that is the case, I have found that some of the mods I have come to know and love (and have downloaded from various sites) have files that are missing from the .dazip file that the native installer needs in order to figure out what to do with the mod, and if the file is missing, it will either terminate with an error, or if the file is damaged or incorrectly formatted, the installer will simply hang forever until I terminate it.
The only way I have found to install such mods (and yes, I have done it for a couple that I've really enjoyed) is to unzip the .dazip file using a tool like 7-zip and either find the manifest file that includes the mod info that needs to be added to addins.xml then unzip it into the addons directory and manually add the information to the addins.xml file (the hard way) or - to extract the mod into a folder in my \\documents\bioware\dragon age\packages\core\override\ folder and delete the manifiest file if it exists. Either way has worked for me. A third option is to do a search for a third party mod installer tool (there are a couple of pretty good fan-created ones available) and let that tool make the changes for you.
Personally, for simplicity's sake what I generally do these days is take the override route - it has the additional benefit of NOT having the mod listed as required DLC in the savegame, and then if the mod does something weird or fails to work, I can then remove it and reload without having to tell the game to Force Load my save and mess up heaven knows what.
I hope this helps, and I wish you luck both with your game and your medical treatments.
