Hi, I was battling earlier to even get into the application but saw a post about DirectX. Installed it (DirectX9) and the 'GameEX has encountered an error' message went away and seemed like it was going to work. The application booted into the nag and wait screen and counted down from 20 seconds. It freezes on 1 second. On a few occasions after pushing keyboard buttons, incl cntr+alt+del it went in. I managed on two occasions to navigate to the All Mame games and it proceeded to do some sort of game list and got stuck on 2% complete. Most times I had to hold the power button down and restart my machine. When my machine booted up each time my desktop background was on black. I reset it back each time. On the occasions where I managed to open task manager and force shut my background was black and the desktop icons missing. I have deleted Game EX and reinstalled it on a number of times. This made no difference. I run Windows XP Pro SP3. My Mame runs 100% and my PC has no issues I'm aware of. Please help me solve the problem. I am about to start manufacturing arcade cabinets for a living and need a front end to make my system look professional. I cant be selling a system with bugs. Thanks, Alex