Some folders non-openable, right-click shrunk

Hi everyone ,
I am in need of help on a strange problem plaguing my external drives.

I had this PC running on Win-Xp [Home ver] which is not connected to internet because i use it to store company confidential data. But, somehow i believe a virus infected ext drive or usb was plugged to it somewhere in time and then the fwg started to happen.

1. Both my external drives via USB could not be opened at My Computer window by the usual dbl-clicking. I had to use the right-click "Explore" option only to be able to open & show the contents. However, the internal drives were still dbl-click openable.
2. Gradually, this happened too : some my EXCEL, WORD , PSD files refused to be opened and gave error messages. Like "filename too long" or something like that. Later, some folders' ordinary JPEG files refused to appear as thumbnails (and just as a std graphic icon) and these affected wont be previewed by Windows' most basic picture & fax viewer. On Photoshop, they either won't open or those that opened, show up as a white blank picture.
3. Those affected folders show 2 distinct behaviours:
A- folder wont even respond to double-clicks anymore and on right-click, the usual many options shrank to just 4 options "Open, Explore, Search, Send to.." and neither would respond with anything on selecting them. I even tried to use UNLOCKER to delete it out of curiosity, but even that action wouldn't be allowed too.
B- folder that responds to dbl-click will prompt an error msg "Can't access this folder. Path is too long." What does that sanely mean ?

I have read about a peculiar "RECYCLER", "SYSTEM VOL INFORMATION", "AUTORUN.INF" virus which may do these to your drives (is it true ?) because I also see these 3 "faded ghostly folders" after unchecking the "Hide protected operating system files" under Folder Options. Is this the culprit that is causing the above to my drives ?

I have since formatted all my affected slave internal HDD except the C:WINDOWS drive remaining and I dot know how to save it , at least i hope i could try to salvage my 2 remaining ext data HDD which are also affected the same way.

I bought the latest Kaspersky and scanned the external drive and it shows no virus or problems with my 2 affected drives. Why ?? When I bring my 2 affected ext HDD to other clean pcs, the same darn acting-up folders still behave the crippled way too.

I'm getting afraid that whatever is going on will spread and eventually I'll lose all my company's precious data if it's not recovered.



Greatly appreciate to anyone with knowledge on the above problem and could kindly offer me the right solutions or shed some light / advice to recover my external drive folders / data ..??

anxiously waiting for HELP,
All my best regards
Jason.