Periodically on one of my friends machines, he gets an error that says "Error reading game list file" on startup and Mala will not start. To resolve the issue I force Mala closed with Cntrl+Alt+Delete and delete the AllGames.* files inside of the Mala directory. After doing this Mala will start and after a refresh of the game list, all is well.
Its an older version of Mame (I think it's .7ish) with a complete set of ROMS.
In researching the error, I came across a post that mentioned something about the brackets being removed causing the error and another post about a John Elway game? I can't remember, but this time around I left all the brackets on it.
Any ideas?