okay, I searched google(and still am)and also the BBS on the official site. What my problem is that custom content(in this case, a hairstyle) i've downloaded shows up in Bodyshop, but not in my game! I have both the expansion packs, and my downloads folder has subfolders, but they are only one folder deep. Everything is unzipped. I can't seem to figure out why. I have Show custom content checked, I have the meshes...Can anyone help me figure this out, please?

I have two suggestions. First, try deleting the contents of your thumbnails folder. Second, try putting the hair and mesh into your saved sims folder. You could also try creating a sim with the hair in bodyshop, and see if you can see the hairstyle in CAS.

i can put hair meshes and clothing etc in saved sims folder so long as i dont subfolder. i spent ages tidying them all up into neat folders only to have them all not show.
once i unfoldered them again they showed fine
in my downloads folder they showed fine subfoldered though. but the loading time was slow, hence moving them to savedsims
so trying them in savedsims might work

simsample- a few of the sims I have made in Bodyshop are the ones that made me realize not everything was showing up in my game. I figure if BodyS can read why not my game!

thank you both for the suggestions, deleting the stuff in my thumbnails folder helped...now if I can only figure out WHY that helped!

virtual cookies for ya both!

Ha, I love cookies! The reason the thumbnail deletion helped was that sometimes the game gets 'confused' about which thumbnails belong to which items. I have this a lot, as I'm constantly adding and removing custom content. What happened was that your hair was there, it just had the wrong pic... most likely it showed up as a Maxis hairstyle. When you clicked it, it would have shown on your Sim correctly. Sometimes this happens when you have a mesh missing too, only then when you click on the pic you won't get to see the hair/ clothes- you'll either get an invisible sim, or a Maxis substitute. Deleting the thumbnails forces the game to re-generate the pics, the only drawback being that this can sometimes slow the game down at first.