Home directory is not being backed up in Time Machine

Problem: It turns out my home directory does not have any backups in Time Machine for the last year. I've never received any error message indicating it wasn't doing the full backup.
Goal: I'd like to get Time Machine to back up my home folder (which contains 100% of the content I care about) again, ideally in a way where I can keep my history from the last time it backed up successfully.
How I found out:
- I opened Time Machine and realized all the "pink bars" were dimmed all the way back up to Sept. 2011 when I navigated to my home folder or any folder within it.
- I cloned a file within my home folder, did a manual Time Machine back up, opened Time Machine and verified that the backup volume did not contain the cloned file.
- I did this again while watching the Console and verified that it did not make a large enough backup to include the cloned file.
- I explored all the backups in Finder and realized that indeed all the backups that corresponded to the dimmed pink bars in Time Machine had no home folder.
- I did an "ls -a" in the backup volume in Terminal and realized that it was not the case that the home directory was present but merely hidden.
What I've tried:
- I created a new admin account, logged into that and did a manual Time Machine backup from there. The new account was backed up, while the original home directory still wasn't. This continues to be true in subsequent backups made while logged into the main account.
- I examined the exclusions list in Time Machine preferences. The only items were the backup volume itself and another partition of that external drive I use for other backups, as expected.
- I did a "Full Reset of Time Machine" (http://pondini.org/TM/A4.html), with a reboot before re-enabling Time Machine. The plist file did change to become much simpler, but the home folder is still not being backed up.
Other notes:
- I run Dropbox, and have those contents in a folder one level under the home directory
- I run Git
- The existing backups have only used 500GB or so of a 1TB partition, so it's not filling up.
- I ran Verify Disk in Disk Utility on both my backup volume and the mac's HD. The backup volume appeared OK, but the mac HD was "found corrupt and needs to be repaired". I could boot into the Recovery HD and repair it, but I feel like this is a risk and I'd like to have a working backup before I do that (I don't have another external HD around to make a temporary backup). Could the corrupted drive be the reason Time Machine has been silently skipping the home folder?
- My home folder is named "apple". Might this be a problem? I'd rename it, but that's a risk and I'd like a verified backup before doing that.
- The Time Machine plist file in /Library/Preferences is pretty hard to read in pico, TextEdit, etc (maybe this is normal?)
I've scoured the forums and pondini's very thorough troubleshooting pages to no avail. Please let me know if anyone has ideas. Thanks.

Latest update: Bought a new external harddrive, set that up as the new Time Machine volume, but got the exact same results (all but my main user directory are backed up). This is after another Time Machine reset (deleting the .plist), starting up in Safe Mode, and trying to initiate the backup from both the account that doesn't get backed up and another administrator account.
Here is some of the output from the Console when filtering messages for "backupd":
10/5/12 2:51:23.572 AM com.apple.backupd[13529]: Backup content size: 481.57 GB excluded items size: 11.31 GB for volume Macintosh HD
10/5/12 2:51:23.572 AM com.apple.backupd[13529]: Found 1437613 files (470.25 GB) needing backup
10/5/12 2:51:23.573 AM com.apple.backupd[13529]: 564.3 GB required (including padding), 1.5 TB available
10/5/12 2:51:23.581 AM com.apple.backupd[13529]: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
10/5/12 3:40:33.297 AM com.apple.backupd[13529]: Copied 763432 files (21.54 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Put the relevant parts in bold. No messages about why it only backed up 21.54GB when it found 470.25GB that needed to get backed up.
Does this make sense to anyone??

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Allan:     I'm running version Mac OS X Version 10.6.8     PS Processor is 2.4 GHz Intel core 15
Memory 4 gb 1067   MHz DDr3 TN And @ 1983-2011 Apple Inc.
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Thanks for helping me!    - John Garrett
PS.
Hardware Overview:
Model Name:          MacBook Pro
Model Identifier:          MacBookPro6,2
Processor Name:          Intel Core i5
Processor Speed:          2.4 GHz
Number Of Processors:          1
Total Number Of Cores:          2
L2 Cache (per core):          256 KB
L3 Cache:          3 MB
Memory:          4 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed:          4.8 GT/s
Boot ROM Version:          MBP61.0057.B0C
SMC Version (system):          1.58f17
Serial Number (system):          W8*****AGU
Hardware UUID:          *****
Sudden Motion Sensor:
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