I resigned myself to reinstalling all of my poser content one file at a time from scratch. I have about 3 gigs of files left to install. Today I decided to try the external drive on my desktop again in the hopes of being able to format it to see if that would fix it. For some reason even though my desktop is older than my laptop, it seems to be able to scan for the drive once I'm in Computer Management. The drive showed up as 'healthy' and without a system next to it. When I first got it, it had 'Fat32' under system. I did a format of the drive using NTFS, and now the drive shows "healthy" and has an NTFS system listed next to it. I checked for hidden folders and there are none. I can now surf around my computer with the drive plugged in and it doesn't lag or freeze up my computer, and I can access the drive through "My Computer" without any difficuty. I haven't tried it on my laptop yet, but I will shortly. If it works there, I will transfer my new runtimes to the external drive.... but keep them on my laptop's drive as well, just in case. If after a month of using them from the external drive, it proves to be working well, then I'll delete them from my laptop's drive. But I'm not taking any chances!!! Whatever it was that went wonky when I did a hard shutdown during the defrag, seems to have been remedied by formatting the drive..... well that and if falling off of my tower (which sits on the floor) may have helped a little. But yay!!!! It works! Too bad I had to lose all my files though :( I now know that it's not a good idea to open folders while you are defragging!!!! I think that hidden folder that had 'restore' folders/files in it was the problem. I'm not sure what was in there, but I made sure that the drive is absolutely empty now and showing it's name as 'new volume'. So hopefully it will work ok. Thanks to everyone who offered all kinds of suggestions in order to try and retrieve my lost files.

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi