I've tried many things. What I found worked was to first launch bitcoin-qt and make sure it synced there correctly. Then, exit that. Start up armory and "rebuild and rescan" under help menu. Then, restart armory. This does go very quick with new db system in Armory. These steps should have worked. Also, verify you are at latest block: Check lower right corner in Armory block and compare it with the current block off a blockchain website to know latest.
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As a follow up to achow101 help so far, I had some corruption in the blockchain as seen in the logs. I painstakingly re-synced the bitcoin core from scratch. It took 24 hours(approx. cumulative) on my computer. I also deleted armory db and let it redo that. I carefully looked at logs and everything seems very clean now. In my case, although I am not 100% certain yet -- time will tell, the problem seems gone. I will post again if I experience the "running ... zc parser threads" hang.