just wanted to say "thank you carlton and goatpig" for pointing me to the right direction. got stuck a few days ago with this very issue after switching to my own big datacenter-hosted fullnodes that my armory client is being connected to with "connect= <ip>". unfortunately, doing this in bitcoin.conf eliminates listen=1 automagically and sets it to "0". bitcoind doesn't allow incoming connections anymore. that causes amory to stay in "node offline" forever. setting "listen=1" after "connect=<ip>" solved this issue almost immediately. thank you!! *being relieved*