If anyone else has this issue i have found a solution for me that may help. In launchbox go to manage emulators, edit retroarch, select start up screen and make sure "hide all windows that are not exclusive full screen mode" is unchecked.
I have launchbox on a external drive with everything working. Got a new pc which I connected to the external drive and the swanstation core and hbmame will not load the roms, as in the emulators/cores just shut down. I have installed directx and c++. As said it all works fine when I reconnect it back with the old pc.
I managed to get the HBmame versions to show by downgrading launchbox to version "12.4" as this is before the mame fullset importer was updated and uses a sligthly diffrent way off importing mame roms. I then updated back to the current version iam on (13.0). The only issue was i had to delete the "InputBindings.xml" in the Data file within launchbox.