Flushing the timer out immediately, requires decoupling the update from the timer, which is why I rearranged the layout the way I did; this cannot be done otherwise.
I am not really interested in back-porting only the filter bar changes to the current official 1.6 version, because of the number of crippling bugs in it, but you may cherry pick the code as you like.
If you are not interested in the other changes, then I will fork the the project and re-release in another thread at some point in the near future.
Side note: for the system graphic, you should consider using "systems/[System]" instead of "systems/[DisplayName]", because for consoles, most people will be configuring the emulator to use thegamesdb for scraping, and "system" will always be the same for everyone, where as display name forces your users to use a very specific name for each display to get these to appear. This will require renaming the pngs in your layout, though.