Ah, Retron thanks for posting your specs, helps a lot in figuring out what's wrong.
Err, well, good news. I think I know what's wrong...
Bad news... at the moment there's no real way around it,

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Your dash is fine, and as you said the reason your screen is on the fritz is because you have the newer focus encoder. I would ordinarily recommend PBL 1.3.5i WITH a newer BIOS X2 4979 and above... but you said you have the 5530 kernel... which isn't compatible with any PBL at the moment. The only thing you can do now is have EvoX boot up instead of PBL, but yeah, you'll have to sign all your XBEs.
As for the xtfdash.xbe, make sure you're changing the unicode instances of X T F, so when you do a search with the hex editor, check the Unicode option. (It's encoded as unicode so the characters will have an empty char into between them [they look double spaced]). Oh, and just incase, when you sign things with xbedump, it makes a resigned copy of the xbe called out.xbe. You need to copy over the out.xbe file and not the original xtfdash.xbe
- ZoGger