Thanks for the suggestion, but honestly I have used ASC and driver booster myself for years. I run the complete scan daily with all items checked, it doesn't take any longer. I have a few more daily clean up apps I run as well to keep my PC in good shape.
Regarding the other emulators, I tried both, I couldn't get retroarch to work at all (its what I use for NES, Sega Master System, Genesis, and Sega CD). I think it was a bios issue. I could not find version 5501 anywhere. I read several places to rename 7300 to 5501, or 5500 to 5501 and it would work. It wouldn't for me. For ePSXe, I tried it, and it worked just fine but looked awful. To try to remedy that, I found what appeared to be some really great guides to using shaders on youtube. I followed them to the letter, but they always messed up the aspect ratio of not only my game, but the entire PC. I tried again and again, completely removing ePSXe and starting from scratch, even removing it from the registry. Somehow now its gotten to the point that it crashes completely when trying to load an image, even from a fresh install.
My PC should be plenty powerful enough, its just a couple of months old, 6 GB Ram, 64 bit Windows 10, Intel Core i3-4170 3.70 GHz processor.
I am at a loss.