Desktop file locks up & hangs w/ "not responding" message when ope

I have a shortcut on my desktop for a My Book external hard drive (F, which
opens all the saved files on it (i.e., pictures, music and videos). It has
worked fine up until recently.

When I click on it now, it opens partially (you can see the bottom and side
scroll bars), but then it hangs and i get the message "not responding". i get
the usual 3 options to close the program, wait for it to respond, or restart.

it doesn't respond, if i click restart it just takes me back to the desktop,
and the same thing happens when i choose to close it. when i hooked up the
external drive to a different computer which had XP, the file opened fine
with no hanging problems.

i have tried everything at this point:
changing the USB cable to a new one, trying a firewire cable, checked to see
if every single driver on my computer needed updating, did a disk check &
defragment for the external drive (which actually got it to open once, but
then it didn't respond again), as well as a disk check and defragment for the
hard drive, checked for viruses (none), and system restore.
none of these seemed to work.

what i did notice yesterday though, is that if i tried to search for a file
(such as a certain photo album) on that external drive (F by clicking the
start button and under "start search" putiing in the name of the photo album,
the file opened and all the pictures came up.

but when i clicked the F: drive icon on the side bar with all the files to
see if i could open it from there, i got the same "not responding error".

any help would be greatly appreciated.

nyc79