Set up pause on X-Arcade, now it's causing shutdown?!

[independentthread]

I've got the guts of an X-Arcade two player set-up, with all X-Arcade parts, and althought they may be a little mixed up (ie the 2nd player stick is set up as 1st player and vv, and the buttons are all mixed) but overall it works the way it should.  All the games will emulate on Mame32 perfectly with a little work on the joystick configuration file...
MY PROBLEM IS:
I set up one of my extra buttons to be a UI escape, and another to be Pause.  When I don't have the escape set up as one the arcade buttons, the pause works perfectly.  When I set up the escape button, the pause will work once, and the second time it will escape from the game.  Is this a fluke and I'm the only one who's ever had this happen, or does anyone else know of this???  I haven't had the chance to check it out on regular Mame to know if it's native on Mame32 or not.
System:
Duron 1400
Soyo motherboard (don't know which one off top of my head)
256 megs of ram
Windows 98
No bells or whistles.

[u_rebelscum]

I'm guessing, but...

Sounds like the UI Cancel key (aka esc, aka UI escape) is a left or right shift, ctrl, or alt key, and the pause button is the other shift, ctrl, or alt.

Don't do this (for win mame, at least).  Windows treats these keys differently when mame is paused than when it isn't.  When paused, windows sends mame both left and right of these keys when either left or right is pressed.  So if pause is left shift (for example) and UI Cancel is right shift, you'll get what's happening to you.

Just use a different Xarcade key for pause or UI Cancel.

[independentthread]

Sounds like the UI Cancel key (aka esc, aka UI escape) is a left or right shift, ctrl, or alt key, and the pause button is the other shift, ctrl, or alt.

Nope, The first time I tried it, I had the pause set up as the regular 4 key (as in not the keypad) and I had the cancel key set up as the close bracket key ( ] ).  I tried it with several other buttons, seeing if i could just swap out the switches or something, but no dice.
It's really starting to piss me off because I was having minor problems with this and that (i.e. this wire wasn't long enough, that wire didn't have a connector on the end)while I was setting it up, and then I finally got everything wired and working...and now THIS happens!!!

[independentthread]

I'm still confused as to why, but I guess I've finally got my problem solved...just not the way that I wanted.  I don't know if it's because I extended the wire too far or if maybe I have a couple of bad switches, but basically what I did was rigt up a couple of switched behind my coin return buttons (thought I was being original till I was on Google and found that several other people had done this too).  I had one set up as open bracket, and one as close bracket.  Basically anytime I have either one of those set up as ANY of the UI buttons, if I try to pause the game more than once per session it will escape back to the game select screen on Mame32.
Nothing seems to be working the I want it to right now.

[paigeoliver]

I think the real problem might be the fact that you have both an x-arcade and a coin door, which implies that you have an x-arcade grafted onto your cabinet. I hope not.

[independentthread]

I've got the guts of an X-Arcade two player set-up, with all X-Arcade parts.

At the time it seemed like a good deal, but since then I realize I could have gotten other parts for just a little bit more.  For $50 I got 2 joysticks, 20 buttons and the keyboard emulator card with all the wiring from it, all authentic X-Arcade parts.
The problem with the coin door is that it isn't a WORKING coin door.  It didn't have the inserts for the coins, so rather than just having it for looks, I rigged up two switches onto the back side of the coin return buttons.  Basically if you do put coins into the coin door, you're essentially throwing money at the computer.  Oh well, at least it takes pennies.