I configured rapier to use a folder on my removable memory card. My initial problem occurred because this folder hadn't been created and rapier hung when it didn't create the folder. I was confused by the message that it was indexing, when it actually wasn't. Running rapier from the command line helped me figure this out. I didn't set the SWORD_PATH environment variable (not knowing about it), however. Rapier did create the modules directory but failed to create the mods.d directory. Creating it myself allowed everything to proceed normally and I can index the text, etc. I'll simply not use commentaries, dictionaries, etc at this point in time (although I can use them on my much less powerful Palm PDA).
Thanks!