Custom Textures !!!!

Wow, this has driven me insane. Seriously why does valve/source make it so complicated!?

I've been trying to get a custom image into hammer basically. I couldn't get the image to save as a vtf *with* a transparent background retained, never the less I went ahead without it to test and opened VTFedit and created the vmt. I put both of them in to this path:

tf/materials/custom

Open up hammer located them and get the black and pink blocks of death. I've tried putting them in various main folders and sub folders to no avail. I have tried different settings with the vtfedit and .. basically I don't know where I am going wrong. I follow tutorials which say the normal "save it as tga then import in vtfedit" or "use ps plugin save it as vtf" "create a vmt" "put them in X folder".

Yet somehow ?

So here's what I'm asking, it's a big favour. Could someone kindly let me send them the texture, then convert it and make a vmt. Then explain which settings they used ? Because for weeks I've tried and failed. I sense it's the vmt but I'm not very clued up on what should be going on there and let the program do it automatically !!

ok vmt reads :

"LightmappedGeneric"
{
"$basetexture" "Custom/bluehub"
}


I checked the names as well. I have a vtf plugin already for corel ps, which I'm using.

Yeah this is my problem ! everything seems to be correct, it's to the power 2, it's a vtf, has it's vmt, is in the right folder path yet ...

For now I'm just leaving the custom ones out and working on other things, because as much as I've tried and double checked everything a million times, I can't get them to work.

edit: It doesn't have the transparency layer yet, when I saved it in ps it just formatted to a white background, so that's not the concern for now. (I'll work out how to do that in ps later) but as a normal standard 512x512 texture it's not working in hammer.