I must have got the pin number wrong in the first Fritzing image... luckily not on the test board 
I checked both libraries initially and they both use pinMode before writing data, otherwise I planned modifying them, so no problem there...
Originally I did not use the interrupts but I noticed when writing a few lines of text (using lcd.clear, go to line/row and write something), the strange/random chars occurred more often... Once I used the interrupts option to space events, everything was better controlled and almost never writes strange chars anymore... (comer to think of it, it may have had more to do with the delay(200) before writing to LCD that fixed the problem)...
I will build another sketch without the interrupts and see how it goes... who know, maybe the interrupt part is causing the random characters...
Thanks liudr...