I am just using a keyboard at the moment, the cabinet is under construction I am not using X-arcade or any other controllers at the moment other than the keyboard. The win 8.1 installation I have is a clean one in that I built the PC, installed win 8.1 and haven't loaded anything else other than the files to run the various pinball emulators, front ends, tables and other required files. I have also been careful to make sure I am not running anything when debugging my issue other than pinballx and VP - checked the tray and task manager. I have not yet backed out the real DMD and replaced the old VPinmame dll yet to see it that helps so I'll try that. I also didn't go in to Pinballx and make sure it was running as administrator. I made an assumption that since it was an install it would not be necessary for me to do this but that looks like it may have been a bad assumption so I'll go back and check the exe's and the DLL's in pinballx and those in VP. I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks.