1,000 Photos Disappear, 18 months of Backups don't help

After updating to iLife '09 (8.02) from '08 and all its predecessors, all my photos since February 2008 have completely disappeared. They are completely gone.
I've:
1. Rebuilt the library from iPhoto
2. Used iPhoto Library Manager to rebuild the library
3. Used Time Machine to restore the library to various dates (pre-installation of iPhoto '09).
4. Used iPhoto '08 (version 7.1.5) to view restored files from Time Machine.
No luck at all. Two interesting items, though:
1. When viewing the library in v8.02 as the library exists today, there are 169 photos. Note that there should be about 1,500. When I use iPhoto's "Browse Backups" command to "page through" the Time Machine backup file on the library, the photo count is 169 for every single backup going back 18 months. (In other words, I believe that the TM file is either corrupted going backwards or is only a copy of today repeated backwards. Other theories welcome.)
2. When I use v7.1.5 and open a February 2009 TM backup library, then it (says it) has 24 photos vs. 169 in 8.0.2. Just as in the other case, when I page back through history into earlier times, the number of photos remains at 24.
The library file is both large, at 3.42 gig for 169/24 amateur point-and-shoot Canon Sure Shots and incredibly stable, according to iPhoto is has been at the same size back a year or more.
Needless to say, but I will anyway, I'd very much like to find those photos of the kids.
A.) Is there some other program that will look into an iPhoto library to tell or show me what's in it?
B.) Any suggestions or theories (suggestions much preferred!) on how to proceed?
All this on MacBook Pro Core Duo running 10.5.7. Permissions cleaned fairly frequently; Cocktail every couple of weeks.
Thanks.

Time Machine is a back up tool not an archiving one.
At some point these photos were lost - lets say that happened on day 1. As TM works it updates the back up until the back up disk is full. Lets say that happens at day 30.
Then at day 30, anything from Day 1 that is not still on your Mac is dumped to make room for stuff from day 31.
So, TM does not back up things for ever, just for as long as they are on your Mac + 30 days in this example.
An archiving tool would keep them for ever.
As to how this might have occurred?
One possible way is that, at some point as second Library was created, and this then was used to overwrite the older library. This would account for the existing library and the missing photos. How this might happen without human intervention, I don't know. Perhaps a misconfigured back up application at some point? But I'm just guessing.
At the risk of pressing on a sore point it demonstrates the importance of testing back ups too.
FWIW my back up procedure uses two different apps, three Hard Disks, and four locations.
Regards
TD

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trash or anything else, try rebuilding iPhoto (but
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