A non-tech-savvy member of my family has done something to compromise one of my computers. It was completely inundated with malware and viruses. I ran several scans from different anti-virus clients, including boot-time scans, which seemed to catch many of the worst cases of malware.

My bitcoin private keys are in cold storage using Armory on a device which has never been attached to a network. My question is, should it be safe to initiate a transaction from the compromised computer using the Armory client, to be signed later on the Armory cold storage device, or should I wait until after I have reinstalled the operating system on the first computer? Is there a precedent for malware that can tamper with unsigned transactions and alter addresses or amounts?

I have read all of the documentation I can find for this wallet (not much), and played around with it a bit. Before I take the plunge, I just want to clear a few things up about how it operates. Official documentation: https://ciphrex.com/docs/Bitcoin_Vault-Getting_Started.pdf

I have experimented with backups on a small amount of bitcoin. It seems like I am unable to restore my wallet balance solely from an exported private and/or public BIP32 keychain, or from a keychain file. My understanding from the documentation is that all of your actual used addresses are stored in a separate account file, and indeed I do get my balance back when I restore that file from a backup. Is this by design, or am I missing an aspect of the backup? It doesn't seem very useful to me to have a master seed that can't restore full functionality to a wallet without another file, since I can't simply store the master seed in a paper backup and have faith that I could restore my funds in the case of a hard drive failure or theft.

Can anyone elaborate on the functionality of backups for this wallet?

Hello. I am new to Armory. I have Armory version .93, and the Bitcoin core version v0.10.0. I am using them on a Windows 7 machine. When I start the program with no wallets imported, it appears to work with out issue. It successfully completes the steps of initializing the bitcoin engine, and will present the window which says that blockchain loading is complete. However when I import my wallet it starts to give me problems. It will rarely finish scanning my wallet before crashing. Also, if I try and restart Armory after I have imported my wallet, it will crash immediately upon program start. This is what the Windows event viewer says about the crash:

"Windows cannot access the file  for one of the following reasons: there is a problem with the network connection, the disk that the file is stored on, or the storage drivers installed on this computer; or the disk is missing. Windows closed the program ArmoryQt.exe because of this error."

One strange thing that occurs when I first import my wallet to Armory, and the program says that it is scanning, is that Armory slowly starts to take up more and more of my RAM, up until it is utilizing up to 95% of the 16 Gigabytes I have on my system.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled completely, several times on two different drives, and I still get the same crashes. The only thing that ever remedies the situation is if I delete my wallet files from the directory "C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Armory" folder. After that, Armory seems to work like a dream again, even without a reinstall. But of course it isn't much use without an imported wallet.