It's highly likely we misunderstood the actual issue- we are very busy, and sometimes skim through posts a little too quickly. (And yes, we get many threads, emails, and issues regarding user-error type things, so we often quickly pass off real issues or bugs as such).
I think a lot of the misunderstanding is that the ULX MOTD is
supposed to show up to all users on startup if it is enabled (mode is not 0). We don't currently have a configuration option to have the MOTD enabled, but not show up to users on join. So naturally, we assumed issues with the MOTD configuration.
If you click the 'Preview MOTD' button in XGUI with your current settings, does the MOTD show up properly? If not, then there is some sort of configuration issue or bug that needs to be looked at. If it does show up, then it's very likely a bug with the startup code that triggers the MOTD, which needs to be looked at.
One thing you might try (if you can) is running ULX/ULib on it's own- temporarily remove any other addons or gamemodes so it's running in vanilla sandbox. If it does start working, then it could potentially be a conflicting addon or heavy load times on player join that's preventing the MOTD from opening.
Anyways, check those things and post back here. I'd be happy to take a look at the issue myself and see what's going wrong with it. Add me on steam:
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Stickly_Man and post/PM me your steam username if it's significantly different than your forum name here.