Fusion and Gens+ issues

My last thread i was getting my HTPC all game exed up.  its pretty spiffy.  only problem is, sega CDs will not load.  im thinking this is more of a user error than a problem with game ex or the emulators.  For the sake of trying to get it running, I have installed both Fusion and Gens+.  Yes both have the bios loaded and both play outside of game ex when opened and loaded with the appropriate bin file.  my problem on both is that when launching through game ex, they both just kick me back to the game load screen.  If done too many times, Fusion will actually stay with a blank screen overlay on top of game ex and windows media center meaning i have to do a Alt+Tab just to get out of it.  I'd prefer to use Gens+ as it is faster and seems to work better with the games.  the roms are in the right location and the art downloader has even worked for some of them.  I even tried adding the -.scd tag in both of them hoping that it might make it work to no avail.  

I'm not even sure if removing and reinstalling will do anything as I believe its a problem with the config.  

Any pointers?