Ok....so I figured out the cause of my problem.  I was trying to sell the entire balance, but apparently the web wallet returns an error that seems to suggest I have a zero balance.  If I reduce the amount I'm selling to leave enough to cover the fee, things work as expected.

Maybe this is a bit of a shortcoming from a UX standpoint...

How should I go about reloading the wallet?

Ok...thanks for the advice.  However...those instructions leave a significant gap at the start (especially for Windows clients).  How do I setup a full node to begin with?

Thanks for the tip about chain_server config.

I think my lowly DSL connection speed is the bottleneck at the moment.  I'll be making my own occasional backups of the raw_chain folder from now on.

Well, I may have needed to upgrade to 0.9.2 (had downloaded it, but apparently did not actually install).

In any case, I now see that the blockchain must be downloading (it says it is 23 weeks old).  It was in sync a couple weeks ago, so something went wrong for sure.

If I try to open my wallet, I get the following:
10001 level_map_open_failure: level_map open failure
Failure opening database: C:/Users/<username>/AppData/Roaming/BitShares/wallets/default
Status: Corruption: checksum mismatch
...etc...

Is that bad?  Do I need to re-import my wallet from a backup?

If you currently hold any actual PTS, that's probably a sign that you should dump it all now...it's certainly not going to push the price of PTS up once people see that's it's no longer listed in the BitShares market.

A long time ago, I put in an order for BitPTS - before it was clear to me that most of the markets were not trading yet due to 'insufficient feeds'.

That's fine. I left my order there for when the market started.

Now, BitPTS cannot even load in the Bitshares GUI (v0. 4. 24).  I get a brief notice that states 'Cannot initialize market module, failed to get assets data'.  After that, the BitPTS market page shows no information.  Most notably for me, there is also no indication that my open order still exists.

I tried the following command in console:

wallet_market_order_list PTS BTS (and variations of BitPTS, BTSX, upper / lower case, etc).  All I get from this is an error like so

-----

10 assert_exception: Assert Exception
arec.valid():
    {}
    bitshares  chain_database.cpp:1625 bts::blockchain::chain_database::get_asset_id

    {"symbol":"PTS"}
    bitshares  chain_database.cpp:1627 bts::blockchain::chain_database::get_asset_id

    {"quote_symbol":"PTS","base_symbol":"BTS","limit":4294967295}
    bitshares  chain_database.cpp:2493 bts::blockchain::chain_database::get_market_bids

    {"quote_symbol":"PTS","base_symbol":"BTS"}
    bitshares  wallet.cpp:4204 bts::wallet::wallet::get_market_orders

    {}
    bitshares  common_api_client.cpp:1731 bts::rpc_stubs::common_api_client::wallet_market_order_list

    {"command":"wallet_market_order_list"}
    bitshares  cli.cpp:556 bts::cli::detail::cli_impl::execute_command

-----

Next, I would try cancelling the order, but even though I can see the item in my transaction history (with a label like 'ASK-xxxxxxxx'), I do not actually get access to the transaction ID.  I gather is not the same as the hex code we see after the 'ASK-' and 'BID-' prefixes in the transaction history (of course, in futility, I tried using that code anyway).

Is there any way I can just list all open order in my wallet, so I can get the actual ID and then try to cancel the order?

So I've been trying to figure out when BitShares will be released, and the best I can determine from various posts in this forum is that we will get a 2 week announcement (e.g., so folks like myself have time to withdraw from trading platforms to our own wallets).  Is there any approximate estimate of when this will happen?

In any case...where should we keep watch for the announcement...would it just be a post in this forum?