Ea games don't support body shop as they say is is add on.
I run my game now under Vista and like you had body shop trouble problems, tech support at MTS2 work a great help.
I religiously now since NL delete the groups.cache file. It is most annoying.
Remove your downloads and saved sims folder with all its contents.
With the body shop Icon in BV start up body shop and see if it loads, if it does clone a sims character and save it, and recolor a piece of clothing save it and this will make body shop generate a new saved sims folder and a downloads folder fixing any root directory error that had been generated, copy and past all contents of the old saved sims files and the downloads folder into the new ones.
If it crashs again afer reinstallation of all the files then you have a file conflick and then have the tedious task of locating it and deleting it. I usually out of my 15000 files end up with one or two with every EP due to Maxis file mod.
clean installer may help as does conflick finder I downloaded from MTS2. I hope the four letters MTS2 is not blasphis here.
Hope this maybe of some help.
I have Vistas too and all of a sudden yesterday I could not access bodyshop. It started when I tryed to by clothes in the game. Now I had just been in BS earlier that day, but when the game crashed I tryed to load it afterwards. Since then it keeps crashing. I haven't downloaded any sims or hacks lately that aren't compatible. So I just tryed your suggestion.
It crashed again without both folders and now has left me a long list in my sims 2 folder that reads stuff like this:
TS2bodyshop 2007.11.10 9.34.09 MDMP
there are 203 of these files. I have clean installer but I can't figure out how to find the conflict here. Can you tell me how you did it?
By the way, It may just be me but have you noticed that with vista there is a new problem weekly? Even if you hadn't downloaded anything. I have an updated graphics card but every week I'm having a new issue with the game.