[pkscout]

how do i get this to display when i hit play without having to select nowplaying/fullscreen. id like it to just start on artist slide show or maybe even wait 10 seconds after any navigation?? (standard confluence skin on eden)

I think the only way to do that would be to either have a second plugin that runs as a service that would check to see if music is playing and tell the skin to switch to fullscreen. And I'm not even sure that's possible.

Or should i be getting this to run as a screensaver (if thats even possible) so instead of dimming the screen, it runs the artist slideshow as the screensaver as the music is playing?

Screen savers are completely different animals in XBMC, so you won't be able to get Artist Slideshow to run as a screen saver.

also does it download images everytime i play an artist or does it save the images in a folder for later use? ie. if every time i play pink floyd, will it go out and download pictures everytime as if starting afresh?

Artist Slideshow caches the images locally. If you are using the default options, then those images will never be deleted. There are some options to limit the size of the cache. Check out the AS wiki page (link in my sig) for more details on that.