OS X Mavericks :: How To Get Migration Assistant To Successfully Migrate Between Two Desktop Machines

I spent 4 days trying to get OS X Migration Assistant to successfully migrate between two desktop machines, both running Mavericks 10.9.3. 

The two machines were connected by an ethernet cable, and all migrations would fail after 16-24 hours, with the progress bar stalling out at "Less than one minute remaining". 

Before every failed transfer, Migration Assistant would inaccurately show "157 KB selected" for transfer if the "Computer & Network Settings" option was checked, or "0 KB selected" for transfer if only the "Applications" or "Documents & Data" options were checked. 

I finally realized that the migrations were failing because I was opening and clicking through Migration Assistant on both the source and target machines at around the same time. 

The eventual solution was to open Migration Assistant on the source machine first, and click through as far as I could until the source machine was actively looking for other machines on the network. 

As long as I waited until then to open Migration Assistant on the target machine, it would correctly calculate the size of the files to be transferred and the migration would succeed. 

So, the order in which you open Migration Assistant seems to make a big difference: source first, then target. 

My problem is solved, but only after several days of hassle, so I wanted to post this in case other people had a similar issue. 

(I tried many suggested fixes that did not work, included reinstalling OS X on the target machine, running disk repair and fixing permissions on both source and target, changing file sharing on the source machine to include the whole drive, trying to migrate Applications and Documents & Data separately, turning off wifi before the transfer, etc.)