[dcb]

re: display funnyness, you need to power cycle the board and the LCD. They need to be initialized after being powered up to display correctly, and they (all) have a finicky initialization scheme AND don't like to be initialized twice for a given power cycle. I have updated the code so you can power the LCD pin 2 (and only pin 2) from arduino pin 15 (analog 1) and so the guino will turn it on and off for you and it should be much better behaved after resets and reprogramming. But it sounds like the lcd controller power might somehow be flaky if you can touch a wire and make it glitch.

re: pinout, tried to find a balance between short tidy hookups with the basic arduino layout backed up to the lcd, and a leaving multi purpose pins open for future enhancements (pwm, tx/rx, analog).