I am with my family for Thanksgiving tonight and just wanted to pop onto the board real quick... So I don't necessarily have time to figure out all the problems being presented... Suffice it to say, emphatic 1.10 (I hope you're using that version) is a lot buggier than I'd like it to be. I don't believe the most recent version causes problems with syncs anymore, or at least I got rid of the problem where it kept config.ini open.

The screen with Homer Simpson at Homerpalooza is the emphatic easter egg/about screen, which appears if you hold down the knob while the "On" option is selected in the emphatic menu. If that was triggered *without* holding down the knob, then it's possible emphatic was just really slow due to not having enough memory.

The ReserveCache option needs to be in the [Startup] section of your config.ini. So putting it "at the bottom of config.ini" doesn't help if the [Startup] section isn't at the bottom.

Anyway if these suggestions don't help, please concisely state what your problems are now and I'll try to take a look at them in the next day or two if I have a break from Thanksgiving festivities... Or wait for my next version, which I am completely rewriting the internals of to hopefully address some of the bugs.