More Awesome Than You!

Now, this is weird. Last weekend, I re-installed my game. Nothing was going wrong, I just hated all my sims and so got rid of them all. I had made a copy of my DL folder (of course) and saved it to my desktop (of course). After the install, I plopped the old download folder in ... please note that I changed nothing!
And now, the problem: my original objects thumbnails show up, but the color options are only custom content. For example, I must have twenty recolors of the Lady On Red painting. If I were to click that painting to hang in a house, the menu shows me twenty color options...none the original. If I don't click any option, sometimes the original will be placed (although unpredictably so). Usually, however, one of the recolors appears.
This has never happened before, and I've re-installed the game about as frequently as it reticulates splines (re-re-re...).

Any thoughts or ideas?

If you use SimPE I would run the folder through the Scan Folder option and see if there are an 'Unhealthy Packages' conflicting with your current install.  If there are, you can have SimPE attempt to fix the object.  If it cannot and you really like that picture/object then I would try export it myself and see if this action corrects the recolor.  Easier - just delete the painting and possibly redownload it from whence it came.

Just a thought.

The thought had crossed my mind, and it sounds reasonable, except for two things:
1) Before running the game w/new downloads, I always run my DL folder through Clean Installer....and there are no duplicate packages
2) I didn't add or change anything to said folder before re-installing it. There was nothing funky with it before, and now there is.

I have to come out of lurker-mode to answer this  ;D Being non-awesome it may be the only time I have an answer to a problem  ;D
I've had this issue in the past. Reinstalling the CEP fixed it.....make sure you get the latest version.

I didn't even think of that! I think that I have the newest version, but I'll try that tonight when I get home. Good thinking, and welcome out of lurker-dom!

There's a new one out, 4.1.  It came out for the FFS pack.

The reason you need to redownload CEP for the recolors to show up after reinstalling a game, is because it appends other files in the directory, and references them as well.  As far as I can tell you always need to reinstall it, as it won't update.  The CEP controlly-thingy thats in your downloads folder is generally set to "Read-only" and so won't record if you reinstall the game

*hits thanks button many times*
Thank you all. The newest CEP is now dld. Things now work swimmingly (thank all the deities that are), and I'm much happier. Humbler, but happier.