Sims 2 mods not working.. not a noob*?

Long story short, I have Sims 2 Deluxe with university and Family Fun.. I had new cars, houses clothes and all that. Usually the game displays a screen that says if i want to enable or disable custom content, it didn’t show up, once I got to “my house” all the custom content I had put in were there, but in the catalog they didn’t have the little flower thing. I played for a little bit, then restarted the game. This time all my custom content was still in my house, but not in the catalog, and they were still in my downloads folder. I got rid of the house, then deleted my custom content, and got all new ones. played the game still nothing, so I completely re installed the game and my exp packs. I made sure that everything that needed to be in the downloads folder was, and used body shop and sims2pack for what I needed. Started the game, they showed up in the custom content box at the beginning of the game, but once I got in the game nothing was there. Sometimes i would have to restart the game so that they would be enabled, but still nothing..When I first installed custom conted I made sure that I wrote everything down, and I followed it to a “T”
I dunno what to do lol