I put a 1k resister on the backlight and this fixed only the first character. Don't know what it could be really.
That's pretty large, is your backlight still illuminated?
Did you make this change that I mentioned in reply #9?
"A character mode LCD like the one you have does not have to be refreshed. Therefore the code that you have in loop() should be in setup() and loop() should be blank."
Also, you don't need the lcd.clear() but if you do use it it should be placed after lcd.begin().
Don