How to get current version of Nivo-Slider jQuery pluging to position controls over slides?

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I have a web site running an older version (2.6) of the Nivo Slider jQuery plugin, on top of jquery-1.6.1. I noticed that the current versions of Chrome have a problem which causes the slide show to get stuck on the second slide. Googling, I discovered that others have run into this problem, and the advice was to upgrade the version of jQuery. So I swapped in the latest version of jQuery (2.2.0) but that failed with two Uncaught TypeError messages ("$(...).live is not a function" and "nivoRun is not a function"). So I backed off to jQuery 1.12.0, but I still had the same errors. So I then tried version 3.2 of the Nivo Slider plugin, and that eliminated the failures, but it also caused the controls to be pushed down from where they had been, over the bottom portion of the slides, to a position well below the slides, obscuring part of the content below the slides. I used a negative margin-top to push the .nivo-controlNav div back to where it used to be, but then the controls were no longer visible. I tried setting the z-index for the div to a very high number but it seems that the plugin's JavaScript code is overriding my z-index, pushing it back to "auto" (though I haven't been able to find where it's doing that).

Is there way to get the newer version of NS to show the nivo-controlNav div where it used to by default (superimposed over the lower portion of the images)?