Using the latest BitCoin (0.8.0 rc1) causes Armory (0.87) to crash on my system with the following output when launched from a terminal:
/home/me/.bitcoin/blocks/blk00020.dat is 134,217,728 bytes
Attempting to read blockchain from file: /home/me/.bitcoin/blocks/blk00021.dat
/home/me/.bitcoin/blocks/blk00021.dat is 134,217,728 bytes
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc'
what(): std::bad_alloc
/usr/bin/armory: line 1: 8057 Aborted (core dumped) python2.7 /usr/share/armory/ArmoryQt.py
I've read reports of others using it with no issues.
Unsure if this is related, but I was using Armory for quite some time on another laptop, and Armory would, every 30m or so, drain all my system resources, so I'd have to quit and restart; at one time my whole system became completely unresposive (mouse movements took about 30secs to respond) so I decided to hard power off my system. The hard disk, which was is relatively good condition according to SMART, is now is full of bad blocks with a lot of my data inaccessible. I was able to recover my wallet files which I have now imported into my only other system, a notebook with SSD, could my wallets be causing this issue?
Edit:
On a second load of Armory, I now get this error:
/home/me/.bitcoin/blocks/blk00025.dat is 134,217,728 bytes
/usr/bin/armory: line 1: 9533 Killed python2.7 /usr/share/armory/ArmoryQt.py
I've also tried loading it without any wallet files in the .armory directory but to no avail.
It's entirely possible that you have a corrupted blockchain file. I have had this happen to me before --
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=44887.0 -- I spent like 4 hours tracking this down to a single flipped bit in 2 GB of blockchain files. I simply redownloaded the chain, and it worked (not so "simple", anymore).
The other issue could be RAM... if you are low on RAM and have no swap space, I suppose it it could bad_alloc because it can't allocate any more resources.
Armory hardly uses any HDD resources. If you have HDD issues, I would blame it on bitcoin-qt or some other app -- Armory uses about 50 MB total, the rest is RAM. I suppose if you start swapping, that would cause HDD issues. However, sometimes Armory can go into freakout mode -- where it hits some unrecoverable error, and it starts sucking up a lot of resources. One of those, I believe has been fixed -- try going to the bitcoinarmory.googlecode.com page and download 0.87.2.
Other than that, there's not a lot of useful information in those bug reports. I know it's never fun to redownload the blockchain, but it is the likely culprit when you consistently fail at the same blockchain location loading.
