@ds store, I was going to go down the exFAT path but decided to do a little more research before spending considerable time to copy off the data, format the drive and copy the data back. exFAT does look to be a good solution and something I will try on the next USB drive that I need to share between Windows and Mac machines.
Here's what I found that works. It's called SixtyFourSwitcher. All it does is provide a Preference Pane to allow you to boot in the 32 bit kernel as opposed to 64 bit or vice versa. It obvously requires a reboot. I switched to 32 bit, rebooted, connected to my NTFS USB hard drive and proceeded to copy files from MacBook to the USB hard drive without any issues. When I finished with the copy, I switched back to 64 bit and rebooted with no issues. Nice little tool to use when needed, and it's FREE!
Here's the link for the download which includes Readme file with excellent information.
http://seiryu.home.comcast.net/~seiryu/sixtyfourswitcher.html