My first reply seems to have been eaten by the Arduino server.
Any help would again be very much appreciated.
It's probably too neat. You should use wires that are all the same color and then twist them around like spaghetti. You have a good start there with the +5 and GND leads coming from the Arduino to the breadboard.
Your connections look OK as does the sketch. You don't need the delay or the clear but they shouldn't keep it from working properly.
I haven't seen anyone use the 8-bit connection in a long time and never since the introduction of v1.0. Maybe they broke this library along with introducing the other incompatibilities that have shown up. Why don't you try LiquidCrystal lcd(3,4,9,10,11,12); and see what happens?
Another long shot would be a bad solder connection or a bad breadboard connection.
Don