for you, i think you just need to press X to play your games if you need to change your settings again before the game starts up. and save files are kept in E/SAVES
anyway, i'd been having problems getting games to play. games like FF7, chrono cross, legend of mana, all kinds of games that always worked before. for a while, i'd thought that it was my crappy HDD, running things slower since it's become nearly full. it was simply that my xbox doesn't like v13, but is fine with v11. my xbox is fairly old, with some ghetto, unflashable xecuter2 chip. i don't really care that it wasn't working, since now it is, but maybe this'll help someone.
also, i'd really appreciate if you, Xport, would look into why japanese games have that loud buzzing noise. most of them seem to work as likely as any US game except for that. i've tried the JP bioses, but they don't seem to matter (none of them seem to matter). anyway, some kind of theory would be appreciated. thanks either way.
The buzzing is usually caused by a game trying to play CDDA and it just not working properly. Hit Disable CDDA in the CPU fixes menu to get rid of it.