Mala won't run emulator! HELP!

[taylormadelv]

I had mala 1.05 (I know it's old) running with misfitmame .95 just fine. I had an issue with aspect ratio and made the mistake of trying to reinstall mala. No matter what I do now, a game will not actually play and display on screen. The roms will load but then the screen stays on the game list. I even installed mala 1.74 and get exactly the same thing. I've gone through the mame config settings over and over but I must be missing something. I can see that in a right click menu that "emulator not running" in grey. I keep trying to get mame to run but the game won't play. Does mala have to run direct draw so that mame can use direct draw? Does it make any difference?
It appears that mala is looking at some previous prefernce file that I don't know how to erase or update. I'm not even certain about how to get a clean install of mala to fix this problem, if that's what it takes.
Thanks in advance!
Rich

[danivempire]

have you tried running the emulator directly? I mean without launching it with mala? That way you can see if the issue comes from mala or the emulator itself

as for a clean install, just delete the mala directory and install the new one, because mala doesn't change any dll or things like that.

[taylormadelv]

misfitmame runs just fine by itself...