Update:  weeks after I uninstalled Armory, I found out my hard drive was failing.  Not sure if it was related to the problem I had with Armory taking several days to install.  In fact, you could argue that the installation of Armory put my hard drive onto its last legs.  Luckily, I had SMART turned on in the BIOS and it told me the HDD was failing, and shortly thereafter I was able to clone my HDD onto a new one with no data loss or need to do a reinstall.  So everything is cool now...but I am not going back to Armory, sorry!

TonyT