You may want to try putting the CHD's in a tempory folder to keep them out of the equation. At least this way you're tackling one thing at a time.
I know it's tempting to go all out and throw the works at it, but when things aren't going according to plans it's best to take incremental steps so you can see where it's getting wrenched.
with mame run outside of pinballx and select a game and see wot screen it plays on if its a horizontal game then i play it on the backbox if it aint on the backbox go into mame settings for that game and select a different display screen my backbox is display 3. in the mame folder wrer your exe is make a dummy folder called dummyroms and in the pinballx settings for table path point it to the dummyrom folder.