The reason I'm holding off on updating is because I don't want to re-do my offline laptop.. And IIRC the old version cannot sign the transactions created by newer versions unfortunately.
Do you happen to remember which port ArmoryDB is listening on?
The tx signing message format was extended in 0.96 to support nested segwit scripts. This means, if you are trying to spend coins from a nested segwit script, Armory versions prior to 0.96 will not be able to sign the transaction. My recommendation is for you to update anyways, seeing your online version is already of the 0.96 family.
You are letting ArmoryQt automate your DB process, so it randomizes the port used. As you can see in your logs, this time around it was:
10038 is a Windows socket error code. It happens in either of 2 cases: the client is trying to connect to this port but there is no service running behind it (meaning the server never started or crashed), or the server is trying to listen on this port, but some other process already bound it.