I took GaRHaR's advice and tried the external drive on my laptop. I plugged it in and browsed to the same folder where the crashes occur............no problem. So I reattach the drive to my desktop and again tried to browse the same folder..................and the system crashes. Could it be that there is some wrong with some other piece of hardware and not the drives themselves? My next test would be to remove the external drive, put it in my external bay then test it on my laptop.

Any advice from the experts on steps to take from this point?

Hi if it is USB then maybe your USB on PC is dodgey??

I don't think you fully understand jelly bean. The USB ports work well since I've been using them with other devices and there has been no problems. The main issue is the crashing of the hard drives when browsing, more specifically, one of the internal drives.

Hmmm...
But you've done a complete reinstall of Windows...

ok - are you able to get in to the drive from Safe mode?
(Tap F8 once you boot the computer up, and select Safe Mode when it comes up).

Uninstall the Divx Codec pack. That should fix it. Or do Start > Run > regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll. Let me know the result.Thanks

Hey guys, sorry for such a late response. More important issues arose that I had to deal with immediately. The good news is that I think my PC is fixed. I did some research based on AMDPhenomX4's post and found that the Xvid codec could cause system crashes. So I did a proper reinstall of the codec and there has been no crashes since.

Thanks AMDPhenomX4. Consider this problem solved. (Hopefully)