I have the electronics somewhat tidily installed now, and have updated the routines quite a bit. I still have more to do with the electronics, adding LED's and some other stuff (new drive system incoming! 
) but at least the bots parts are not dragging all over anymore. 
Thanks tons to "mem" for a considerable bit of help today on a comparison value issue I was crunching up against! With what I learned from that today, I will be updating the software over the next week to do multi-directional scans (instead of just three that I do now - left, right, and center). This should help quite a bit to make the bot movements more natural.
Since the first post above, I have added scanning while in movement, created alert and actively scanning sounds (that was fun!) and speaker to play them, and have been working on building some motor mounts for the new drive units I will be using next.
Some pictures
And the new motors - I got these with switches, which I will implement in the next week for a basic location reckoning system, and to detect if the bot is stuck on/against something 
and my home made steel motormounts - im not a skilled metalworker for sure - but still took a good amount of time to make... not pretty, but they do the job