control pannel/winpac issue - please show me your mame wisdom

[omnivorism]

I've ran into a bit of a snag with my mame project.

I've got a dedicated pc working with a front end, 800 console/ arcade games, plus both hi and lo res versions of mugen.

I've got my control panel built with buttons and joysticks in, mostly wired, and a ipac 4 (even though im only using 2 players, it was the one on ebay at the time)

If i use the winipac program, i just get a time out error when i have it set to ps/2.  although oddly enough if i tell it usb, it starts to program, then says drivers loaded, programing failed.

with the older version of winpac it just says "jumpset set to mame"

the joystick is responsive and works correctly, but the buttons are whatever they are default so instead of SW1, SW2, SW3 being like A,S,D like i would like, they are weird defaults like Control C, x or whatever.

I think maybe the problem i am having could be software to hardware compatibility...

I saw something similar on another thread, and someone said maybe its just a missing plug in or dll.

any suggestions?