"Create hard-links" appears in notification area and causes thunar, ls, system monitor, etc to freeze

I recently installed Ubuntu 14.04 on a Dell Vostro 1500 laptop, then switched to XFCE. A "Create hard-links" icon appears in the notification area, and after this, thunar freezes. Nothing happens if I open it via its icon, running instances freeze, and running it from the terminal causes it to freeze. System Monitor will also freeze if I go to the File Systems tab. A process called mount.ntfs uses 100% of cpu #2. If I cd to /media/[myusername] and do an "ls", it freezes. Etc. Many other things freeze and have to be killed, all things related to accessing the hdd.

Screenshot of the "Create hard-links" icon: http://herbaloutfitters.com/ubuntu/hardlinks.html

I recently ugraded (via fresh install) from 12.04 to 14.04.

This started after I mounted my two ntfs external hard drives and resumed backing my system up with deja dup and backintime. This all worked fine in 12.04. In xfce, however, the drives wouldn't mount at startup, so I run the following script at startup:

#!/bin/sh

udisksctl dump |
  awk -F':\n' -v'RS=\n\n' '/[ \t]*HintAuto:[ \t]*true/&&/\.Filesystem:/{
                             print $1
                           }' |
  while read dev
  do
    udisksctl mount --object-path "${dev##*/UDisks2/}"
  done

Once I did this, then my backups started to run again, and after the deja dup backup completes, the "Create hard-links" appears and remains there all day, causing the freeze problem.

What can I do to stop thunar and other programs from freezing up? What is this "Create hard-links" icon, anyway? Left and right clicking on it do nothing.

Thanks,

Kanon