Well if it's metal it doesn't mean it's bent/warped for sure; I just like to throw that out there b/c I had so much trouble with mine. The way I found out mine was warped was when I was standing behind the dish, I would start pushing on the left side of it (to move it towards the right) and before the dish actually started to rotate the Q signal would jump up. This was happening b/c I was slightly bending it inwards while pushing on it. When I would let go, Q would drop back to 0 on the meter. It's hard/impossible to perfectly fix a bent or warped elliptical dish, but I did try to adjust mine and it actually made it better, just not as good as it would have been if it was in perfect shape.
And your elevation may or may not be off. I suggest setting it at the 38.8 (40 works) you mentioned and rotate very slowly back and forth. If this doesn't work then raise/lower the dish about 0.5 degrees and rotate back and forth again. If your skew is right, you should be able to find the signal using this method.
If you look in "The List" each TP looks something like this: 12151 H 20000 (this is from 97W)
The first number is the frequency, H/V for polarization, and the second number is the symbol rate (your receiver may call it just SR). You need to check your TP settings on your receiver and make sure it is set correctly for everything. Last night I realigned my dish to 97W and some of the TP info was wrong. There were even a few TP's that I had to add.
Your signal strength is simply how strong the connection is between your dish and your receiver. The quality signal is the actual signal you receive from a satellite. So, a high signal strength is good, but around 30% Q or above is needed to view anything without choppy video.
Also, you might like
FTAList.com - The easy list of North American free-to-air TV channels - it is an easy to use channel listing with basic info, channel homepage links, and you can sort it by language.