Moving from Macbook Pro back to PC.. Pictures Lost?

Hi all so i've decided to take a dip back to the dark side and got myself a new PC. Many for this.. but offtopic.

Heres my problem:

I have 7000 pictures/videos within iPhoto. I've let iphoto handle all my files into it's own library. I've searched and searched for the best way to get my pictures/videos over to my PC and keeping the 'event's in seperate folders.

I've learned that we can go into the iphoto application folder and use the "original" folder to copy all the original files. Heres the dilemma.. i move them to my external harddrive and then over to my PC.. However when I try to open the file on the PC.. it says invalid image.

Not sure why? They are either .avi (movies) or .jpg(pictures).

What am I doing wrong? I've literally killed 10 hours trying to figure this out over the past 3 days.

Well, i have literally just done the same thing.

I imported all my photos to iPhoto.
I setup Events and copied relevant photos into them.
Once completed I right clicked on a photo and clicked 'show original'
In Finder I navigated to the 'Originals' folder and copied it to an External HDD [FAT32 - however this shouldnt matter]
This was then put on my Windows machines.

The photo files should be saved as jpegs so will open on a Windows machine.

Mine works great, all my events are displayed as folders within the Windows structure, and all photos and vids are displayed correctly.

I would do the process again, make sure you 'eject' your external HDD before removing it.

This may not be the approved method to do it, but I just click on an event in iPhoto and then drag it to my desktop or to a folder then drag the folder to my external hard drive. I've never had a problem with this working.