As an addendum to my previous post, try the following main():

main(){ 
 char hold[3];
 hold[0] = 'H';
 hold[1] = 'I';
 hold[2] = 0;
 printf(hold);
}

See what happens. If this code produces garbage, too, then I'd say you definitely have a problem in your lcd_write() routine that has something to do with the data coming from internal RAM/XRAM.

If the above works then I'm probably wrong and the RAM/code memory issue has nothing to do with it.

Regards,
Craig Steiner