Migration question

Morning,

I've been banging my head against a migration which shouldn't be this difficult.

I am migrating from a 9ir2 (9.2.0.8)(32bit) on Windows 32bit ---> 11gR2 64bit on W2008R2 64bit.

This should have been straightforward.  Export the 9i, precreate the 11g, import...easy peasy.

Until the initial import took 17+hours.

After numerous conversations with user groups and Oracle Support, it was determined that my largest table (44mill rows) had a column of type XMLTYPE, which meant that it was being stored as a LOB.  Thus, the normal imp/exp rules don't apply.  its exported conventional and is imported one row at a time.  AWR reports run during the import show that the only waits are on the DB CPU time.  Basically, the database is just chugging.  Importing just that table with rows only (no constraint or indexes) takes 12 hours.   For my 24x7 shop, thats just to long