Does it matter that I installed bitcoin core first, downloaded the blockchain and then synced up?
It's better to do it in that order.
After that, I installed armory 0.96.5, but needed to change the path for armory to the d: drive after the initial install. I checked the status of the box "prune block storage" in bitcoin core, but that wasn't until after the initial installation.
That's unfortunate, likely you have a pruned copy of the chain, that cannot be used as is by Armory, you would need to resync your node with the pruning off.
How do I proceed? What checks do I run, which logs do you want posted in pastebin?
Make sure you have a full chain with Core then start ArmoryQt. If you get pathing issues, try with ArmoryDB on its own. The useful log files are armorylog.txt and armorydb.txt. You can find them in your armory data dir (defaults to C:\Users\*yourusername*\AppData\Roaming\Armory).
"target" is d:\armory\armoryqt.exe and "start in" is set to d:\armory.
This won't do much for you. You installed armory in D:\ but that's at most 100MB of data. The database which takes several gigs will go to the default folder mentioned before. What you are trying to do is to get Armory (and Core) to save their data in the D:\ drive.
This link will help you through that:
https://btcarmory.com/docs/pathing