All controls suddenly stop working in-game

[Destrothocon]

I just got PCSX-reloaded working on mac OSX 10.4.11 and it runs great, full speed. I just bought a logitech gamepad F310 (irrelevant info) and got it to work with the two games I d/l'd so far, metal slug X and Final Fantasy Tactics.
Here's the problem; when I defrost a frozen state, the controls no longer work. And since you can't access the preferences menu while a game is loaded, that's that. I also reconfigured the controls to keyboard keys, and the same thing happens, in both analog and digital control modes.
Then I tried FFT, and the keyboard and gamepad controls work up until the first turn of the first battle. Then a noise happens when I press the triangle button, and nothing further. The game keeps running, but I can't control it anymore, even though up until that point I could skip through the dialogue and everything.
Both games are .bin files and seem to work perfectly until these problems happen.
Any Ideas?

[Destrothocon]

I turned on the bios emulation in the preferences window instead of relying on the bios I put in the application support folder, and now Tactics works past Gafgarion's turn.

Still, when I load a game state all the controls are disabled so I can't play. That's not really a big deal, cause save states are kind of a luxury anyway, so long as saving to the (virtual) memory card works. WHICH IT DOESN'T.

When I try to save to either memory card it says "Not enough free blocks on this memory card". I've never even used this program before to save anything.