Time Machine won't increment existing backup.

I've had this problem for the last week and haven't been able to resolve it.
I have a 1TB drive jacked into my Airport Extreme and have been using it for Time Machine forever. Recently however TM has been telling me that there isn't enough room on the drive to complete my backup. It doesn't seem to be recognising that it should be incrementing the existing 600Mb sparsebundle and is trying to create an entirely new backup.
Yesterday I went as far as deleting the old backups off my drive. Then I jacked the drive directly into my MBP (Mountain Lion) and ran a brand new backup overnight.
This morning I ejected the drive, stuck it back into the Airport, and trying to get TM to increment to it but again it's telling me there isn't enough room to create a new backup.
I obviously has something to do with how my MBP is seeing the permissions on the sparebundle when I'm connecting to it via Airport versus directly, but I don't know why. As I said, I've been backing up to TM via Airport like this for years, no problems.
Any help appreciated.

Dominic Pfisterer wrote:
"Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you.
Not exactly one of Apple's clearest messages. 
See #C13 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

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