Rereading my post was interesting, I was in the middle of a life reboot and had lots of free time. Well I have much less free time these days and I thought I could simply upgrade the memory and SSD of the HTPC.
That failed miserably ending up with a new motherboard, PSU and processor. Lucky for me AMD's affordable Kabini series of APU's and motherboards had come on the market. After dealing with hardware that didn't work, I finally have a working Mini-ITX HTPC.
Since I am starting from scratch I really do want to make the changes I've been contemplating for years. Of course XBMC has become Kodi but many of the same problems I had remain. I've since given up on viewing You Tube via Kodi and use my PS3 exclusively for that.
I've also added a Cable Card Tuner to my HTPC and that brought some issues with missing recordings. We'll see if the fresh build and install of Windows 7 fixes that.
So its back to considering Game EX as the front end for my archived media and console emulation. When I tried it before, folders ended up everywhere on my boot drive which at the time was a 64 GB SSD.
So to prevent that this time, I found a good installation walkthrough on You Tube by Simply Austin.
I wanted to start a new thread to chronicle how I'm getting on with and ask any questions I made have during setup.