Dissappearing Characters

[daglob]

Okay, the first few times it happened, I thought it was just me, that I was mistaken.

I have looked at characters in CharacterTool , checked the animations (or not, depending), then gone back later and the characters were gone. The .nif file is there, but it won't display. If I look at it in FF1 (haven't noticed it in FFv3R), the figure is white on white with no shadows (it doesn't look like it's minus a skin, it looks like a 2D white cut out; looks weird spinning in the box). If you try to select it and make a character, it crashes the game.
The first few times I noticed this, I unzipped a new copy of whatever file it was, put new keyframes on it, and it still didn't work. This is why I told myself that I had to have been mistaken about seeing it before.
This happened yesterday with "Spider-Lizard" (It's hard to confuse any other character with Spider Lizard). I know that I looked at it previously (within the past week), and it looked fine.
I thought maybe it was really a FFv3R mesh, and I'd looked at it in CT2 (although why it wasn't in my 3R custom characters folder, I didn't know). I tried that, and it crashed CT2 like any un-converted mesh does. 

Does anyone have any idea what is going on?