External HD won't stay mounted

I have a WD Passport (1TB) that's been exhibiting some strange behavior lately. When its plugged in, after a couple of minutes an error message will appear that says:
The disk was not ejected properly. If possible, always eject a disk before unplugging it or turning it off.
Which is a normal enough error in itself, but it starts to get weird immediately as the error appears. Its almost as if the drive is automatically unmounted, however OSX appears to think that the drive is still mounted. This causes Finder to lock up and the mac has to be hard-booted. I've tried to get the drive to successfully mount on several different computers here in our office and different versions of OSX, to no avail. I've also been able to quickly get a Verify Disk in via Disk Utility, which says that the drive is fine.
Has anyone had any previous experience with something like this in the past? What else should I try to diagnose the problem? While I'm getting plenty of google results for the error message mentioned above, nothing's popping up quite yet that matches the specific symptoms of the drive unmounting and whatnot.

Tried this and it definitely had an impact on the operation of my MacBook, but in the end, no change. I deleted the preference file and restarted a couple times prior to trying to open my external HD, but same result.
I also simply pulled the pref file and left it on the dektop, restarted, and same deal. Oh well. Thanks for the suggestion. Any other ideas?

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