Hey Eric, I tested the program last night and still no luck. The LED was blinking though. When testing voltages something weird did happen though. I looked down and noticed the screen was initialized. I was finally able to turn it off and reproduce it. When touching the RS pin with the positive meter probe, with the negative probe not touching anything, the screen will initialize and be blank.
This is crazy, the chip works, everything seems to be hooked up right, LCD will initialize with a little positive voltage on RS from the meter probe. Yet it still doesn't display. I've tried several different schematics, verified all connections, and still nothing but trouble. This really can't be that hard.