@hippy - The LCD used is the Sparkfun 232LCD, which has a piggy-back serial driver on the LCD. (Now a Retired Part). I allow a pause of a few seconds in the beginning of the program to get it initialized. I did not want to go into the details in my posting, and I did not mentioned that this garbage does not occur every time, it seemingly happens randomly But when it happened, the procedure described was used to get it going again.
@AllyCat - What "poor programming" do you think can cause this problem? Seriously, it would help to know it so that I can avoid it. - Modules/components used - I think that the LCD will draw quite a bit of current in comparison with the chip itself. I have to look into that. ---- BTW Since I am only interested in protecting the chip itself, I can use a cap. in its power supply line only.