MAME Tech help

[sh4mike]

I was a happy MAME user with no problems until yesterday. I ended up downloading a bunch of MAME derivatives, from MAME32+ to AdvanceMAME to SmoothMAME to MAMEFx. I'm not sure exactly when things started to go wrong, but now when I go into any of these MAME directories, including my perfectly fine MAME32v77b version, I click on the game to load it but nothing happens. I double-click, right-click and select "Open ROM," go to File menu and select "Open ROM" -- but nothing happens, as if the command isn't recognized.

 

I created a new folder, stuck the mame32v77b zip into it and tried to extract the program. I get an error message, "Cannot extract MAME32.exe. The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process."

 

I did a "Find" on mame32.exe and deleted some ".pf" files, but there was nothing else. I then deleted anything on my system related to MAME, downloaded a new MAME32v77n file, but I still get the same error during the unzip. Basically, I can't find an EXE file on my system and I can't extract it from the zip. I'm totally screwed.

 

Can anyone please explain what went wrong and how to fix the problem?