I've dropped a bike or two in my time, the little 125s and 200s are of little consequence other than broken indicators and stuff, its the big beggers that take 2 of you to get it back on its wheels, highly humiliating........

Soldering up something wrong, realising you've screwed up, spending 10 minutes with a solder sucker pulling it in bits and then...   soldering it back up again the same wrong way.  :

You could try changing the parallel printer mode in the BIOS.  

Mine has the options of Output only,Bidirectional, ECP and EPP.  The first two are the most likely to work.

The odd spacing was a 'brain fart' caused by the rush to meet some deadline on the first issue Arduino boards.  The early shields were made to fit the error and then it couldn't be changed without causing problems with the shields.  Nothing to stop them putting a second row inside the 'official' one at the correct spacing however.  Would make stripboad shields an awful lot easier.......