thanks stephen, apparently this is the problem. The f11 key.
I have it fixed for NES, but for MAME I can't fix the problem because one of the buttons are mapped to f11 and I've figured out which it is, however in MAME32, there are no options of where to remap the keys manually in the program, I looked it up in help and it says you have to hit tab in-game, but tab does nothing.
I'm curious if there is a better arcade emulator program....
Also curious if there is a front end program that runs all the emulators seamlessly into one program?

thanks for the help!