First of all, it's a Knowledge check
Don't lose sight of the fact that the player asked to make a Knowledge check because he or she wants information. There's no way around that. Don't worry about that information breaking the flow. If the player doesn't want to break the flow by getting that information, he or she would not be requesting the check.
Tease out the information
Take a minute and give the player some information, piece by piece. Make it into a little guessing game where the player is going to get all the information, but tease it out.
"Well, they're humanoid, with orange skin."
"Like orcs?"
"Smaller. And they don't have the pig snouts."
"Some kind of goblin?"
"Yeah, but bigger than goblins. Much bigger."
"Hobgoblins?"
"That's it!"
The goal is to get the player, as his character, involved in the information analysis. Simulate the training the character might have.
Obviously, if you pick some obscure monster that the player has never heard of ("a fell taint? really, that's what it's called? surely that's some kind of joke!"), then you might need to help out more than usual.
Handing them the Monster Manual probably will break the flow, so I wouldn't recommend that.
Make it personal
This is supposed to be knowledge the character has, right? So make it personal. Instead of telling the player, "It's an orc," and giving all the stats the Knowledge check provides, add in some history or back-story.
This is a golden opportunity for a Dungeon Master. Don't squander it!
"I make a Knowledge check. 29! What is it?"
"Well, your mentor, Grim Wizard Horace, used to talk about these things all the time. He said they were wisps of insubstantial evil that ripped through planar material."
"Wow, they sound dangerous."
"Sorta. Probably manageable. Horace said they weren't that tough for him and his adventuring party, the Wrecking Crew, and you're as powerful now as he was then, probably. But he warned of one thing."
"Oh?"
"Yeah, he said that when their paladin, Golden Boy Gabriel, fell unconscious, the damned things became material again and started feeding on poor Gabe. Sucked his life out of him."
"What are these things called?"
"Oh, you'd never forget that. Horace called them 'fell taints,' though you're not sure if those are the official taxonomic designation or if he was just being crude."
Here are some house rules I've used to great effect – based on the writings of many bloggers and forum posters.
Simplify casting times to Short rest and Extended Rest
If casting time is less than 1 hour, make it a short rest instead. If it's longer, make it a extended rest.
Severely cut the casting cost
Cut casting cost by at least 50%. Consider cutting it by 90%, and eliminating the cost completely when less than a threshold, say 10gp.
Make disenchant free and allow residuum to replace material components
By making disenchant free, the residuum component cost can easily be satisfied by those old junk magic times cluttering up their character sheets.
Alternatively: Replace all material component costs with a per-day limit
Instead of having any residuum and material component costs, some GMs are implementing a per-day ritual casting limit: say 3/4/5 for Heroic/Paragon/Epic. Any rituals that are too powerful this way are simply not available to player characters.
Use a skill check to allow casting a ritual above level
I love low-level characters being able to cast rituals/create potions/etc. above their level. Invest the time and the component cost, if any, and roll the appropriate skill check. Difficulty starts at 10 for a ritual/potion one level above you, and goes up by 5 per level higher.
For the inspirations for these house rules, see:
Best Answer
Skill Ladders
Preparing for a recent Alternity game and I came across something called Skill Ladders whilst reading Wolfgang Baur’s Dataware book. Much of what I learned can be applied to running 4e skill challenges.
Skill ladders are presented by Wolfgang as a way to avoid the monotony of complex skill checks. A complex skill check requires a certain number of successes before a number of failures, just like in 4e. Again just like the OP's problem, this can descend into just totalling successes and failures at the table until you’ve either succeeded or failed.
Wolfgang outlines skill ladders as quickly written lists of what each success or failure means for the characters. Here’s a quick example from my prep for today.
Hacking a locked bio tagged laser weapon
In this example 4 successes are needed before 3 failures
Successes
Failures
As each success or failure happens then you have a brief thing to tell the players. These don't take long at all to write and you could probably even knock them up in game once you've done a few.