I like having Armory start bitcoind as a child process, and would prefer to not have to start it
myself, which is the work-around I have seen given in previous posts.
The code Armory uses to launch bitcoind as a child process is already flagged by the devs as starting to look a little stale and old. I'm not sure that they're planning to overhaul it for this particular release ("ffreeze" means "feature freeze" I think), but it will happen eventually. I also get unstable and/or buggy behaviour when Armory manages bitcoind, although not quite the same issues you're getting.