By the way, the algorithm that I have implemented uses deterministic fragment generation. i.e. You require any 3 pieces to reconstruct the wallet. You print out 5 such pieces. Now lets say you decide too much risk is involved in losing a couple of the pieces, so you can print out fragments #6 and #7 and know that they will compliment the other pieces. Or if one of your fragments is destroyed, you can reprint #2 and know it will be the same as before.
That's awesome and offers tons of flexibility. I can't wait to play around with this feature.
As for peace of mind that the fragments will reconstruct properly... I'm not sure how to do that "right". I can show the user the result of recombining fragments (as I did in my first post in this thread, showing that I did the calculations and got the same answer, but that's not necessarily comforting to the user. They won't be satisfied until they manually enter each fragment into a fresh version of Armory that's never seen the wallet, and they get the correct answer. There's nothign I can really do about that.
Exactly, the only thing you can do is preach about practice! I didn't put any large amount in cold storage until I had reconstructed my wallet 3-4 times, I even did a fresh OS install and reconstructed again.