vol-va-purshotham: Thanks. For the I-485, There was an LUD corresponding to ND and the mailing out of the FP notice. One without msg change on the FP date,
one with msg change for FP received, and finally one with msg chng for the transfer. In general there were LUDs without msg changes for a couple of days when any notice was issued, I assume that was due to internal confirmations of notice, issued, printed, mailed etc. There were no LUDs since my transfer, I received the interview notice and approval by snail mail only.
Nato: Thanks. Yes it was fast and I've been extremely fortunate. There have been several fast I-485 approvals for NIW cases filed in 2005 in VSC and CSC. It may be a pilot program.
There have been other recent EB2 approvals on this forum. I think the information about EB2 being exhausted seems to be an isolated case.
The state visa bulletin has a been very good indicator of visa availabilty, when
visa's are depleted, they issue a warning about that before retrogressing or making
visas unavailable. The last two visa bulletins did not issue warnings for Aug or Sept. for EB2, so I believe approvals will keep coming. There is a remote possiblity that there
may be quota for each service center and NSC might have exahusted theirs, but this
is just my wild conjecture.
LaborBandhi and Labsub: somebody analyzed trends over the last 6 months and
found I-485 NDs to be a fairly good indicator of processing times. However there
are far too many variables to make accurate predictions.
Also, if numbers retrogress then those with early NDs but post-cutoff PDs seem to have proceesing continued right till the final approval at which point it is kept on hold till the PD becomes current.