Hi Carl,
I've now got a bulletin board:
http://www.pminmo.com/phpBB/ The whole thought is that people can learn from others troubleshooting.
In regards to your first problem, every thing will be backwards if you don't get the ground at pin 3. Pin 13 of IC1 should be low as it is directly connected to pin 3 of JP1. Sounds like you are using a 9V battery? What did you hook pin 3 too? The simplest is to jumper it to the adjacent pin on the other row. That entire row is gnd/common/negative....
JP1 pin 3 is direction not step, pin 5 is step. There will always be two outputs switched on. X8-1 will always be the opposite state of X8-2 and X9-1 will always be the opposite state of X9-2.