ok...last question, I hope.......do I need to do a rescan?..........it seems to be stuck at 99%...I'm going to turn it off and on again, that's always a winner.

Not rescan, resynchronize. So remove files in bitbaydata except wallet.dat(for Halo) and if QT remove files except wallet.dat in the bitbay folder in appdata directory.
Since if you got stuck on an orphan chain that would be the only solution.

Sorry for noobr question : may someone please provide me an advice regarding the bolded part?

Im doing a resync and its going really slowly over an hour and still at 2%..I added the new nodes to the conf file (must you delete the old ones?) from chainz website.
Anything else I could do...or is this normal.

Well in Halo wallet the wallet.dat file only tracks transactions and your keys are key1.private and key2.private(only QT uses wallet.dat). Of course you can back up anything you want and should always have multiple backups of your keys. It shouldn't get stuck. However you can send your debug.log file to me via PM (that file is in bitbaydata directory). The bootstrap might not be loading properly or it could be busy doing something. You could try syncing from scratch if bootstrap isn't working for you. Even a new install is fine, if you do that just do a regular install, load your keys and sync.

I'm using the latest market client (2.0). What is the difference between "Actual Balance" and "Available Balance"?

I cleared my old 1.37b/1.38 client and did a clean install of the 2.0 client. I used the menu to load the keys. Everything is synced. Less than 1% of my coins are available even though they are all visible under Actual Balance. I looked in the file "Documentation.doc" in the downloaded BitBay directory. There is no mention of the word "freeze". How do I make more coins available?

Thanks in advance for any help

I don't believe anyone said the fork is tomorrow.  But it is happening soon. Not sure...
The team wants the network to have over 75% of people switched over to the new network update before doing so.
I believe it stands around 63% now (unless I am reading the Network numbers wrong), so people are switching over pretty good.

David or BitBayDev will let us know exactly when that will happen.

Basically ALL your coins will be liquid when the fork happens I do believe.
Don't worry about "freezing coins" in the client or "Doing it in batches" at this point.

Just relax and don't worry about doing a lot of stuff now.
Just sit tight and after the fork we can specifically address all your other concerns later.
In the meantime - go back to the website and review how all this works - it's all there.