More Awesome Than You!

Er, yeah. HALP PLZ.

(http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff53/badluckx/wtfux.jpg)

I have Seasons, Uni, and NL. My OS is Vista.

The typical Bodyshop remedies do nothing. (Removing the downloads folder and deleting the Bodyshop-related cache files/Savedsims.) I think that it might be my video card, but TS2 is still working smoothly.

The Sims that are showing appear to have a lot of CC.  Do the Maxis-made Sims in Bodyshop appear normal?  If so, Bodyshop may be unable to access the CC files required to display them correctly (especially if you're doing things like removing the downloads folder and savedsims folder).  If not, I am stumped.

The Eaxis sims are not showing up normally.

When creating a sim, you can clearly see the thumbnails for everything besides hair and clothing (things that require meshes). Maybe a mesh is causing the problem?

Check your shortcut for starting up Bodyshop.

Sometimes when you install an EP or Stuffit pack, the Bodyshop shortcut fails to update, and points to the old one. This causes many glitches.

Manually go to the Program Files directory folder for latest EP that you have (not the last one you installed, but the last one EAxis released) and make sure your shortcuts are pointing to the Bodyshop in there. Make sure they're not pointing to an older EP (pointing to NL when you've got Seasons) and that they're not pointing to a Stuffit pack.

I've checked. All shortcuts lead to Seasons Bodyshop. But thank you.

Well, I'm stumped.

The hair problem is something I have seen on my laptop when RAM is running out due to either running too many processes or starting/restarting Bodyshop too many times. Does this happen immediately after restarting your computer, too?

The black body is something I have only seen due to a bad clothing download. Yes, glitched clothing can cause the skin to go black, as odd as this sounds. However, you said you removed everything  and deleted all cache files?

You didn't install your video card recently, did you? Or upgrade to Vista recently? It could be your drivers aren't working well with Vista... though I would think the game would suffer as well if that was the case.

Post your specs, I guess, so we can point and laugh at your crappy computer.

a) It does happen after restarting the computer.
b) Yes, all downloads, and all bodyshop related caches.
c) The video card has remained nearly untouched since we had the computer.
d) And as for Vista, we bought a new computer a while after it came out, because our old one wasn't cutting it.
e) We're using 177 GB out of 224 GB.

Corrupt objects file?

RAM?

You posted your harddrive space, which doesn't really affect performance unless you're down to the last 10%.

You haven't messed with any hardware acceleration or virtual memory / paging file options, have you?

Have you tried checking the temperature of your processor and video card using something like Speedfan (http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php)?

My final thought is to try deleting all thumbnails (the entire Thumbnails folder). I don't particularly see how it could help, but it can't hurt either. Since you have some weird thumbnail issues in your screenshot, it will at least be interesting to see what gets generated when BS has to make brand new thumbnails for those sims, clothing, hair, etc.

Oh, RAM. Sorry. I tend to be a bit ditzy when I haven't had my coffee.
I have 894 MB of RAM.
No, I haven't messed around with any of that, nor have I tried checking the temperature, etc with Speedfan.
Deleting thumbnails wielded the exact same ones when I reopened Bodyshop.

You know, looking slightly closer at your pic, I would say you are definitely running low on RAM. Look at all the crap you have open! And I bet a ton of that crap is set to start up automatically when you start your computer, which means your RAM is drained before you even have a chance to run Bodyshop.

With less than 1GB of RAM, you can't afford to lose any of it to other programs when trying to run a RAM-hungry program like BS.

Most times before I run TS2 Bodyshop I open Task Manager and manually end all programs and/or processes I don't need. The first time the WTFness occurred, though, I had a crapload of things open. So I'm not going to eliminate that as a possible cause.

Also, what's this about a corrupted objects file?

Sometimes the game randomly destroys its own files. A corrupted objects.package, Sims##.package, etc. can cause all sorts of problems.

If everything is broken, it's probably not that, because it's very unlikely that all of them (there is one objects.package for each EP, and many Sims## files) would become corrupted. If, however, the broken stuff is from one EP only, then a corrupted file could be suspected. In either case, you would see the same problem in the game as in BS.

Still, at this point you have nothing to lose by reinstalling the whole damn game. It certainly can't make your problem any worse, can it?  :(

Sometimes the core files become corrupt and can cause odd graphic issues in game.
The problem here: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,9070.0.html was caused by bad custom meshes but I've had similar happen in my game when one of the core files goes corrupt and I had something similar to your problem when my objects.package became corrupt. I don't know if body shop looked like your picture at the time. I discovered the problem in game, I rarely use body shop. It wouldn't hurt to replace your core files. Possibly for the base game. You don't have to reinstall. You can manually pull the files from the cd and unzip them into the core files on your pc, allowing them to overwrite the ones that are there.
If it's only happening in body shop and not the game too then that is probably not it.

There's more on it in the wiki.
http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Corrupted_Objects.package

Edit: SaraMK got to it. A complete install probably wouldn't be a bad idea if you feel that manually replacing the  core files would be beyond you or too much trouble. Anyway, you never know what may have become corrupt and where. I once had a Ep and Sps files go corrupt at the same time. Probably will never happen again, but it can happen. I now make sure everything is read only.

Urgh. I was about to replace the objects files, but I think I'm just going to go all out and reinstall everything tomorrow. I can't live without mah Bodyshop, and it'll give me a chance to start out with unfucked 'hoods and a clean DL folder.

That works too. It's not a bad thing to do every now and then. That way you can make sure that it's not anything that you have done or that has gone bad if it still does that in a brand new, vanilla, install. That narrows down the issue a good deal if it comes back before anything gets a chance to change. make sure you try it out before you put your user files back.