Before jumping in the car to go on site to physically access the device I did set the pulldown resistor on the nodes. That message popped out again but I noted that there were no errors after deploying.
It is working fine now. With the pull down resistor set in the node, the behaviour of the pin is as expected and even the cross coupling disappeared.
Thanks a million for guiding me to the solution of the issue. Really appreciated.
Do you know what that pop out message (Pin xx already set as tri) means?