Cannot access sites saved to Reading List in Safari with OS 10.8.5

I just upgraded to 10.8.5, Mountain Lion, and encountered a number of problems with overall performance. One of these problems is that I cannot access sites that I have added to Safari's reading list. When I click on the link in the list I just get another "Top Sites" window opening up.

I'll add a second issue experienced after upgrading to OS 10.8.5. There have been random times when after awakening my MacBook Pro after extended sleep I have received a message that "drive(s) was/were improperly ejected". Since then I have had two external drives from different manufacturers quit on me - on start-up I get the message that "The disk you inserted is not readable by this computer…" even though they were readable recently. One of the manufacturers indicated that they have heard this is a Mac OS problem which is randomly not allowing the computer to wait for a drive to "dismount" properly before going into sleep mode. Anyone else with these problems? Solutions?