[Wintermute0110]

you are an absolute champion.
That was exactly what i needed. I'm not sure what the non blocking launcher setting does but it solved all my problems. I wasn't able to see the error logs in my runcommand log file because it wasn't getting called, kodi was crashing on the kodi-send event, I had assumed the event went through and quit kodi when it was actually just crashing. The only other thing i had to do was quote out the $rom$ in the arugments menu as the "$2" wasn't enough. everything is working amazingly now, thanks for all your help. I will be shareing this with the other raspberry pi lovers and hopefully try to steer some to this awesome addon.

Thanks for your kind words.

If you like the technicalities, when AEL launches and app the launcher is blocking. This means that AEL waits until the launched app is closed and returns. Note that Kodi is multithreaded, this means there are several pieces executing at the same time. When an AEL thread is waiting for the launched app to finish you can use Kodi, use AEL, even launch another app with AEL. In this case, AEL will detect there is another AEL thread executing and will prevent another execution. This is to prevent the database corruption issues that plagued old good Advanced Launcher. However, like in your case, some users need the launcher to be non-blocking. In this case, AEL launches the application and it does not wait for the app to finish. This may lead to database corruption BUT because you are closing Kodi and then run the app in your script it is OK.

So, to summarize: blocking launchers are the default to prevent database corruption and it is what most users want. Kodi needs to run with a Window Manager and keeps in the background and the launched app in the foreground. Non-blocking launchers are for people that need to close Kodi when launching apps, especially in low-end devices like the Pi.