The thing with the edges being visible through the gap... The way I corrected that was by taking a piece of black textured sheet plastic (actually the cover of a black plastic three-ring binder) and carefully cutting it to the desired shape. A blurry photo can be found here for my mark1 installation, I did the same thing for my mark2 installation.

Don't know what's going on with the power-on troubles. If it's not the negative spike issue, then it's something wrong with the player or the wiring. It's not supposed to do that.