Hi,
Due to abuse on the free accounts remote access to the databases is disabled.
You can use PHPMyAdmin in the MySQL section of your cPanel for most admin tasks.
-Corey
In the MySQL section of your cPanel, there is a user section. Try removing the user from your database then reassigning them with all the permissions or creating a new user and assigning them to the database.
-Corey
There really isn't an estimate right now, depending what we are doing with the servers it changes. Some of the servers stay up for days at a time without any issue. It really depends what servers were working on it.
-Corey