I'm having what seems to be a fairly common problem with my Kawaks running my Neo-geo roms.
I have all 181 Neo-geo roms, and the Neo-geo bios file(zipped) in my roms/neogeo folder, but they won't list on the "available games" area.

I went to "File" and then "Configure Paths" and changed one of the open slots to my "roms/neogeo" folder and still nothing.

I was using winkawaks 1.58, then I upgraded to 1.60 from the CPS-2 shock site.
no luck on either.

I also downloaded kawaks 1.48 on recommendation from a post I found, and it found 17 of the games, but thats still pretty crappy.

I found some posts saying that you need to rename some files in the bios, but I went to try that they were already named what the poster had recomended, so I didn't change anything.

These are the files in my neo geo bios:

000-lo.lo
aes-bios
asia-se.rom
neodebug.rom
sfix.sfx
sm1.sm1
sp1.jipan.1024
sp-e.sp1
sp-j2.rom
sp-s.sp1
sp-s2.sp1
uni-bios.12
usa_2slt
vs-bios.rom

and my bios zip folder is titled like this: NEOGEO.zip

I'm using NeoRageX for my neogeo roms now, but I really don't like that program.
I've tried everything I could find online and I'm friggin frustrated.

Someone tell me what the heck I'm doin wrong please!

Either your Neo-Geo romsets are outdated. I good way to check if your ROMs are any good is to try and load a romset that is marked as "unavailable" (IIRC, Kawaks has a filter that lets you list all games and not just those that are considered to be 'Available' by the emulator) and then taking note of the error messages are generated.

ok, I tried to run several games from the list of all games and received varying errors most of which are the same except for the file names that are missing.
a few examples:
"Couldn't find sfix.sfix(c2eaocfd) for game, Error"
"Couldn't find 245-p1.bin(c828876d) for game, Error"
"Couldn't find 024-p1.bin (89c4ab97) for game, Error"

Is this indicative of out of date roms?

Judging by those error messages:

1. Your Neo-Geo BIOS isn't compatible with Kawaks, since it is missing sfix.sfix or the file is there but the CRC is different.
2. Your Breakers Revenge romset isn't a proper Kawaks romset for the same reasons as above.
3. Your Last Resort romset isn't a proper Kawaks romset for the same reasons as above.

To my understanding, Kawaks uses the same sets as MAME, including the BIOS files. Blame your sources for not keeping their sets and BIOS file up to date.