Is it natively SATA or USB? If it's a SATA one, you can remove it and try some recovery techniques as an internal SATA drive.
Either way, how do you feel about learning to use Linux, for a bit? A new version of Knoppix recently came out, and would be a great distro to for this (fairly easy to use GUI, and the live DVD should have several common recovery tools, too). It could be a Windows/USB issue, after all, in which case another OS could allow you to get get the files off.
43 is an awfully generic error. Uninstalling the USB controllers from device manager might work, too, if it's a driver issue (but, 2 PCs doing that, at the same time?).