MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Need help to confirm possible mame bug

I've done a lot of testing already but I need more people to help me test and confirm this bug.

Here's what happens:
If I assign a button on a joypad (I've tested this with a lot of different joypads and it seems to happen with all of them), everything works fine, as long as I always have the joypad connected when I play the game on mame. However, if after assigning controls to a joypad, I enter the game without the joypad connected the joypad controls disappear, and that's fine, but if I quit the game and re-enter, all assigned controls that involved a button on a joypad are completely wiped out and everything goes back to its default.

You might ask "But why would you play a game without a joypad if you have configured the controls to play with a joypad?". Well, I usually set controls for both the joypad and the keyboard. For example: "Kbd E or Joy 1 Button 1", in this case the whole configuration of this button will be wiped out, not just the joypad part. And if after this I close mame, connect the joypad and enter the game again, the controls for the joypad are, of course, gone.

I think you can imagine that this is not convenient at all. Suppose I go through the trouble of configuring the controls on 4 joypads to play a 4-player game with my friends. If I ever feel like playing the game solo with a single joypad connected, all the configurations for player 2, 3 and 4 will be wiped out.

The way I expected mame to behave and I think would be the correct way, would be if it worked the same way mame does for the default controls. The mame default controls for button 1 on any game, for example, are "Kbd CTRL or Joy 1 Button 1" if you have any joypad connected and the joypad option is active, otherwise it simply shows as "Kbd CTRL". Why can't it be like this for controls I define myself?

I've tested this with the following mame builds, with pretty much the same results in all of them:

-Command-line MAME 32bit version 0.149
-Command-line MAME 64bit version 0.149
-MAMEUI 64bit version 0.149
-Command-line MAME Plus 64bit version 0.149 (this one has the courtesy of spewing out an error when I run the game for the second time and quit)
-Mameppk 0.119

I'm running windows 7 64bit, I also tested this on one of my laptops that has windows xp 32bit and the result was the same.