It took 19 days for my and my wife's accoutns to transfer. 2 accounts, 2 toons on each account. As far as playing your toon, if you are online with that toon at the time they go to do the transfer, they "will move your transfer to the bottom of the queue"... That is a direct quote from the reply email I got from SOE when I sent them a request for the status of our moves.
We stopped playing those toons and 3 days later the transfer was complete.
For the record though, you don't have to be logged off the account at the time of the transfer. We were both playing on those accounts just different toons at the time the transfer actually occured (I checked my email after we logged off EQ for the night, saw the email confirmation and then logged back into EQ and saw that, indeed, they toons were transfered.