The problem with emulators is that they're very pretentious meaning that if a single feature is missing, the emulator will behave badly. I know I experienced it with PCSX2. The CPU of my computer had a SSE version inferior to the one request and because of that, no game would run at all and the software caused BSODs and various errors.
For emulators, I always recommend downloading the latest stable version. Configuration is also the key to these issues as well, which means you should configure the plug-ins to match your system.
Download page for latest version: https://sourceforge.net/projects/desmume/files/?source=navbar
