I did a full reinstall and used a PS3 controller over Bluetooth and it is all working now.
All I can think of is that my old 360 controller is on it's last legs or it was pulling too much power.

I personally have been running RetrOSMC which is basically having RetroPie running as a 'Programme' that you can launch from within OSMC and this has worked marvelously for me.

@Krakolis
Hey, thanks for bringing this up.
Kid-mode UI is not supported by the RetroPie folks, who have enough on their plate as it is. Please open up an issue at the repository: https://github.com/zigurana/EmulationStation/issues

@tekn0 awesome! Keep me posted!

i managed to get it working how i wanted in rgui.... not sure why it wasnt before but owell ...

@herb_fargus thank you very much everything works great now!

Thank you @BuZz.

I can not seem to tie-down what the cause is yet. Here is the runcommand log for Vectrex now:

/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh: line 804: 988 Segmentation fault /opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch -L /opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-vecx/vecx_libretro.so --config /opt/retropie/configs/vectrex/retroarch.cfg "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/vectrex/Pole Position (USA) (C10F37D8).vec" --appendconfig /tmp/retroarch.cfg

Awesome, thanks for the quick fix @BuZz :)

Thanks for the help @ProxyCell :)

@Parental_Block See my previous post here for a solution.

We really need more information :P Which system are you talking about? (I guess it's mame)

@BuZz That was fast, cheers!

awesome thanks !!!!

@marcd220 you're welcome, I had exactly that issue so deleted a few roms that I don't use.

oh gosh, i was guessing that was it but i told myself (without checking of course!) "libzip-dev sounds pretty basic and I must already have that, the problem obviously lies elsewhere!" lol

thanks @BuZz that got it working for me again!