but armory went ahead and gave me my addresses and keys
but only 1/3 of the coinz seem to be there..
could such a thing happen?
It doesn't make much sense, no.
Maybe not everything has been shown or there was a bug and armory crashed or something like that?
If you restore your armory wallet with your root key, you will recover all of your private keys and therefore access to all of your coins.
Are you sure that you have checked all addresses and that 2/3 of your coins are missing? Did you maybe not include some addresses which contained funds? Like change addresses?