Why?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=241730.0

What's wrong with this?

How do you know it's been separated  the whole time? Did you build all the components from scratch? You don't know where they've been prior to you getting them. Even if you got everything straight from the factory manufacturer's have been caught hiding backdoors and exploits in their hardware since the 90s at least.

What about the OS you load in it. Did you build and develop it yourself? You know every line of code in it?

I'm trying to create a cold storage for some BTC. I don't have any prior experiece with Armory.

The guides talk about having a computer that you never connect to the internet, the one you use to create a wallet file.

How about booting to a linux distribution from an USB drive and doing it there? Is there some key layer of security I lose?

What if I literally remove all the prior HDDs on the machine, then boot from the USB? In essence this would be a new computer that hasn't ever been connected to the internet, or what am I missing?

AMD 13.1

Rolled back to 12.08 and it was back to business as usual. Updated to 12.10 and works too, going to stay here for now.

It was the drivers. Rolling back did the trick. Feel free to lock this.

As of yesterday none miners refuse to start for me. I've tried several different ones. Cgminer for example just gives the "Started cgminer" message and then blanks and the GPU is obviously not doing anything.

I can't come up with much I changed about my setup in the last few days, I did update AMD drivers but I'm pretty sure that didn't coincide with this and I was still able to mine after that.