Can't open external Firewire disk after upgrade to Leopard

I recently upgraded a PowerBook G4 from 10.4.11(?) to 10.5.5. Now I cannot open its external disk, a LaCie 400 GB Firewire disk, model number 300925, like this: http://www.amazon.com/Lacie-400GB-7200Rpm-Firewire-300925/dp/B00066989Mreport
The disk's icon appears on the desktop after it is plugged in. After double clicking to open it, the pinwheel cursor spins for a while, then Finder appears to restart, redrawing the desktop. When I have the Activity Monitor open during this, I see a process called ReportCrash run for a while before the Finder reset.
Does anyone recognize this symptom? Is there a way to see what is being reported by ReportCrash?

The Genius was skeptical that this was a problem between Leopard and a given disk. Indeed his first test was to boot my laptop from a clean install of Leopard on his own external FireWire drive. Running this way I had no problem opening my external disk from my laptop, running his fresh copy of OSX 10.5.something.
His theory was that something leftover in my configuration files (in /Library/Preferences) from a previous OS was causing the Finder crash while opening a FireWire disk under Leopard. (Since this machine is four years old, there has been a lot of opportunities for kruft to collect.) His suggestion was do a backup (complicated by the fact that I can't open my backup disk, d'oh!) then to do a clean install of Leopard, and then copy back my user folder.
I wish there was a smaller hammer I could use, like setting aside some magic .plist file... Any hints?

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