I am a newbie to MXM, and I have been reading up on how to set it up....and I am wondering if I have missed something important.

I am running it off the HDD...launching from evox at the moment...until I am happy with it...and the problem is I can't get it to use the menu I wrote up...it keeps using the auto menu system...What have I stuffed up?...is there something obvisous I have stuffed up here...I can post my MXM and Menu xmls but I am sure it will just be something silly I have missed

have you tried to reset the cache menu?

Yep I have tried that.

Now it has decided that it is gonna randomly crash every 10 mins or so...and crash whenever I try and ftp it.

Not sure if this might be any help but did you check and see if all your XML tags are in the correct place? or if there's duplicate tags? and maybe try turning off the timeserver at first and see if that's locking you up.

What i did when i first made my Menu.xml was copied all the contents from the Menu_Cache.xml onto a blank xml page and then went and renamed and put the games and apps in the order that i liked