allen13331:
Thinking I might have damaged or miswired something I loaded the Sketch onto a brand new Arduino UNO R3 (not attached to the LCD) and got the same blinking LED. Since there is nothing in the Void Loop why is the LED flashing?
The only way that could happen is that the code being uploaded is not the sketch above
or the board has a blink sketch loaded in it and the upload is failing to the blink sketch is continuing
to run after the upload fails.
First thing I'd do is get uploading working.
Make sure you can upload the blink sketch and that it blinks
using an Arduino board that is connected to nothing but the USB connection.
Then go modify the blink sketch to change the blink time to blink faster or slower
and do the upload again.
Once that is working, go back to trying to get the LCD stuff working.
--- bill