What's wrong with MAME?

[Joejitsu]

I am using my laptop with windows vista to run mame. First I dowloaded mame32 and a few roms. I will play the games for a few minutes (SF2, metal slug 5, etc) and then it usually starts going crazy on me. What I mean is the game window starts rapidly cycling back and forth with my windows background and I am not able to shut down any windows or anything, I have to ctrl-alt-del to log out. I also notice that my screen orientation is at a 90 degree angle when this happens and i have to go into the graphics properties to reset it each time. I thought maybe it was a mame32 problem so I downloaded mame binary 0.125 and the emuloader and it does the same thing. Is it a problem with windows vista?? what can I do to fix this? Thanks guys!

[FatTrucker]

Sounds like its losing focus, could be another program or process being activated by Vista trying to steal focus from mame.
If a mame game is running at a different res to the desktop and whatever app is running wants to run at the desktop res then that would explain the rapid switching back and forth as both apps repeatedly switch the screen mode.

You shouldn't really be getting the screen turned around though. Check in the mame options that rotation is turned off and just for good measure delete anything in the mame/nvram folder.
Just for good measure I would get rid of everything except the rom folder and do a completely fresh install.