Thanks for coming back to me. As far as the joysticks are concerned i have two arcade stick, one steering wheel, two light guns and a ps3 controller attached. On reboot today it recognises one arcade stick. the other is no joystick. I think you are right and ill just have to turn the others off, load mgalaxy then switch them on. Was just hoping there was an xml setting which can control it like in mame.
As for screenscraper. I have a free account logged in and large systems dont seem to fall over. However, my C64 collection does.