Seems strange so many people have issues syncing up bitbay. I came back and started up a new one from scratch immediately with zero issues pretty fast.
I wonder what is stopping some get connections.
Erased everything except for wallet.dat and started it again from the start: seems like eveything is going in the right direction but I still miss last year of transaction. Let's hope tomorrow my morning coffe will be served with full synched bitbay wallet

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Restarting it from scratch worked ut smoothly and quite quickly : everything is up and running now.
Thanks for your advice cryptohunter.