Control problems on main wheel

[nmehdik]

I have an interesting problem that I can't seem to find a solution.

Running Hyperspin 1.4:

at start up, my controls work fine, I can go through the main wheel and select and emulator. My controls still work fine and I select a game, and the game launches without a problem. Controls work fine in game as well. Then when I exit the game, I am still at the emulator wheel where I can select a rom, controls still working fine. Once I go up one level to the main wheel to select a different emulator the controls no longer work. I have to alt+tab out of hyperspin then come back to it to restore my controls. (Clearly this isn't feasible to always do on a cabinet that doesn't have a keyboard).

Things I have tried:
Running my joysticks in analog mode on the hyperhq
Running them as a keyboard through joytokey
Tried with just a normal keyboard, same behavior
Track ball and mouse also stop working at main wheel screen.

Any ideas whats going on?