Blender Particle Hair and Modeling Trouble...

Hi everybody! I’m new to Blender and these forums. I’ve been attempting to model a decent head in Blender for quite some time now and I think I’m almost there.

The only thing I’m having trouble with is particle hair. I’ve read and watched quite a few tutorials that discuss the subject, yet none address the problem I’m having. Whenever I add particle hair and attempt to comb my hair, at a certain point on my mesh the “deflect emitter” forces the hair INSIDE the mesh, rather than outside. I’ve tried to fix this error on my own several times without any luck. I can fix the problem by turning off the “deflect emitter”, but that isn’t ideal. Setting the distance to 0 is no help either.
While trying to figure out the cause of my problem, I noticed that there was something strange about my model.

Below is my mesh “set smooth”: (Since the forums are blocking my images and links, just remove the * from the text below)
htt*p://img836.imageshack.*us/img836/2064/question2.png

Yet those lines are invisible when my mesh is “set solid”.
I believe this may have something to do with the particle hair problems I’ve been having. I don’t believe I’ve modeled my mesh in any out-of-the-ordinary way, yet these lines in my model persist.

Can anyone shed some light on the matter? I’m really at a loss for what to do. Thanks in advance.

Well, I’ve tried reconstructing the surrounding faces, but that just shifts the lines over another face…

Mesh edit mode select all “ctrl” n “make normals consistent”
Mesh edit mode select all “w” remove doubles

Thank you thank you thank you! I had a suspicion it had to do with normals (I’ve had to recalculate them in tutorials before), but I wasn’t really sure how to fix it. :smiley: