Yes we had exactly the same issue. We had so many different issue that I am unsure now how we solved this one, I think that we just switched onto btcdrake bitcoind. We might also have used a bootstrap database afterwards.

We were blocked at block 280xxx

But we did not run the tests from bitcoin core tests, of that I am 100% sure.

It indeed seems like a recent issue that has been affecting a lot of people and its probably unrelated to counterparty, its unliky for us that it struct us several times when we were working with XCP. It might have been because we made a migration from ubuntu 12 to 14 and thus upgraded all our library, ending in the possible open SSL incompatibility