I've had many problems with emitters in gmax. One of the worst problems that I fixed in my custom nwmax scripts is to make the default values more accurate. I assume, but have not looked, that MDA did the same with his updated nwmax scripts.
What I can see right off is that the spawn type is not saving in a useful range. Note in the one it is -1, and the original is 1. -1 is not a proper integer index.
What you might find is that if you click the spawn type radio button to something else and then back again, the internal code onChange will record the value into the nwmax proper location, instead of resorting to a null default value. Then you should be able to keep using the same emitter from gmax saved files.
This was one of the many errors with emitters in the code I originally downloaded for nwmax. I think I started with 0.8b or something like that, and never got the newer updates from MDA, mostly because I put too much of my own work into the scripts and didn't want to have to merge mine with his.
