(1) If you could not successfully broadcast a transaction despite being online, I need your help.  I've heard about a couple other people with this problem, and I need to narrow it down.  I suspect it may have to do with the more-recent versions of Bitcoin-Qt not liking certain signatures made by older versions of Armory.  If you have any more information about why it's not working, please let me know.  If it's that Armory can't even synchronize at all... well I know about that problem already (but since you got an unsigned transaction to be able to be signed, I suspect you did synchronize properly...)


(2) If you switch Armory to "Expert" usermode (might be in "Advanced" too, I don't know), on the window where you would normally broadcast your transaction, there's a button that says "Copy Final Tx (Hex)".  This should give you the raw transaction that can be plugged into any broadcast utility.  You're right that the raw text shown in the text box is not compatible with anything else, but the raw hex should be.  Let me know if that doesn't work.