Weird problem on at least two of the external hard disks I use with my WDTV Live Plus

I have a weird problem on at least two of the external hard disks I use with my WDTV Live Plus. I have a WDTV Live Plus, firmware 1.06.16, and three WD external USB hard Disks that I use with it, two 2TB WD Elites, and one 3TB My Book. On at least two of the drives, various jpg files are instead indicated to be directories. Because they are not directories, windows will not delete them. Of course, it is not at all easy to change the file attributes from ‘ad’ (archive directory) back to simply ‘a’ (archive). I just detected the problem late last week, and I have tried everything I can think of to fix the problem, all to no avail. I even downloaded an evaluation copy of ‘DiskExplorer for NTFS’ and edited the MFT for one of these files, changing (in at least 3 places) the file attribute manually from 0x30 (‘ad’) to 0x20 ‘a’, which in theory could have worked, and at the time certainly seemed right, but in practice, nothing changed, even after the 3 bytes were changed in that MFT and commited back to disk. I also ran ‘chkdsk /f /r’ on the drive (which took almost 24 hours to complete on the 3TB drive), and windows (XP SP3) reports that there are no errors. This I attribute to the fact that despite having the wrong attribute, these files are properly allocated. In ‘DiskExplorer for NTFS’, if I press the view file button, the picture appears on the screen as normal. Outside of ‘DiskExplorer for NTFS’ however, windows will not do anything with these files because as far as it is concerned, they are directories, not files. I cannot delete them, nor overwrite them with a proper file. Short of trying to find the capacity to back up my data elsewhere, reformatting and copying it all back (which would take considerable time as well), does anyone have any solution for this problem. I always thought NTFS was supposed to prevent such problems. Were the file system more straight forward (like FAT/FAT32) it would be so easy to fix, but so far, I am stumped.

It’s a bug introduced soon after version 1.05.04. AFAIK there is no way to fix it except reformat (and it will happen again)