Thanks for the reply.
I am using stable 1.22. Tried nightly as well, same deal. I went so far as to manually open retroarch.cfg and look for 106 and set it to 0. I tried again and it still grabbed 106 as a save state ignoring settings ignoring overrides. It is just bizzare.
Currently im cutting my lossess and installing RA fresh and slowly transferring settings over bit by bit. the issue is not present (yet) in the fresh install.
Im really curious what is conflicting to override everything im telling it to do. Ive used RA for well over a decade across many installs and configurations, first time Ive had this issue.
One clue is that on another game I do have real save states upto 106. This made me think the save state number is being used across all games for the given core, but me setting it manually to 0 should override this as I set an override for the core AND the game AND configured the retroarch.cfg manually its just weird why its stuck like that. In past installs it would act like it should; every new game added gets its own save state numbers. RA trying to share numbers across games is bad for countless reasons.