Guys, unbelievably the issue is solved 1 day after joining this awesome MAME forum, when I had no clue how to fix it for months.

I spent the whole day so far trying out ALL of your potential solutions which led me to the actual solution at the end (all credit goes to you guys, I want you to know that). You all were really so very helpful, what a community! I went to Device Drivers on Windows 10 and started testing and uninstalling each driver one by one. There was one Logitech driver that was the culprit among all my other Logitech drivers. After I uninstalled it MAME64 0.202 works perfectly now.

My exuberance is more relief after these months of it freezing on initialization of roms. It must have clashed with some MAME64 0.172 and above code when the Dev team put something into that patch, since it didn't affect the loading of ROMs for MAME64 0.171 and below. Thank God I did not have to reformat, which was suggested by someone else, elsewhere, and would have been my last resort to be honest.

I will now upgrade to the latest MAME64 0.204 for testing. I will then most likely acquire a drive with Hyperspin as the front end since I know the newest MAME64 now works on my system, I have all the roms for 0.202 and could attempt to do it myself but that seems like weeks/months of work and I really want Hyperspin working out of the box. I don't really want to learn the whole Hyperspin interface and then program each game to work right and add artwork, seems like a steep learning curve. So acquiring a drive online I believe is the way to go for me, I have seen some people selling them online.

I may start a new thread soon and ask you guys what settings you use for the newest MAME like video drivers, etc. that stuff really interest me and this has opened up the latest MAME to me now. I Hope this whole thread can help someone else out in the future in my predicament and again thank you all for your quick assistance, this community rocks!