[pkscout]

I erased everything as you suggested and installed the new version 1.5.5 (master from Github). AS returned the full bio from theAudioDB for the artist 'Marillion' on first play which made me think "Oh, finally this is fixed'. I went into the userdata–> add-on_data–> script.artistslideshow–> artistsinformation–> 52991789 and found multiple NFO files and amongst them there were a theaudiodbartistbio.nfo and a musicbrainz.nfo, both containing data. I check the MBID within the musicbrainz.nfo and it matches the artists actually; does this mean XBMC handled that MBID to AS and then AS wrote the file? I thought XBMC 12.2 isn't doing that yet.

No, what you saw indicates the AS was able to query MusicBrainz to get a MBID for the artist. Once AS gets a valid MBID, it writes it to that file so that it never has to go looking for it again. theaudioartistbio.nfo is created if AS finds an artist bio from that site. So, as with the first .nfo file, that one indicates a bio was found. AS caches that locally so that it doesn't keep going back to the web site for the info. Every couple of weeks the cache is aged out (except the MBID, that is never aged out) and refreshed from the web site.

At this point you are trying too many things at once and not providing me any information that would help me figure out what you issue is. Please do the following:

1- quit XBMC
2- delete the entire userdata–> add-on_data–> script.artistslideshow directory.
3- start XBMC
4- set your AS preference however you would like
5- start debug logging
6- quit and restart XBMC
7- play songs from three artists (I don't really care who)
8- quit XBMC
9- post the debug log and post a link to it here

P.S. your issues have nothing to do with the skin you are using. AS provides the data to the skin. The only thing the skin does is decide how to display the data. So unless your skin is doing something else (like grabbing bios on the fly), that's not where the issue is.