How can I resolve repeated Time Machine backup failures?

Time Machine stopped backing up from my wife's iMac 2 GHz Intel to a designated Iomega FireWire drive on August 6th. I have since erased, reformatted, and reselected the external drive. The profile for the external drive is as follows:
Manufacturer: Iomega
Model: 0x1
GUID: 0xD0B80E5B000BE6
Maximum Speed: Up to 400 Mb/sec
Connection Speed: Up to 400 Mb/sec
Sub-units:
HDD USB 2.0/1394A Unit:
Unit Software Version: 0x10483
Unit Spec ID: 0x609E
Firmware Revision: 0x12804
Product Revision Level:
Sub-units:
HDD USB 2.0/1394A SBP-LUN:
Capacity: 149.05 GB
Removable Media: Yes
BSD Name: disk2
Mac OS 9 Drivers: No
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported
Volumes:
Iomega Time Backup HD:
Capacity: 148.73 GB
Available: 148.31 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk2s2
Mount Point: /Volumes/Iomega Time Backup HD
I have also performed Tech Tool Pro 4.6.2 Advanced Tests on all related hardware to repair any damaged volumes and files but the Time Machine backup stops after at 97.5 MB of approximately 60+ GB of data.
I have been unable to detect a cause for the failure in the Console logs but I note that the following entry has been repeated every few seconds in the system log since about August 23rd:
Aug 26 10:55:30 Dee-Coopers-iMac mds[37]: (Error) Import: importer:0x844400 Importer start failed for 501 (kr:268435459 (ipc/send) invalid destination port)
Aug 26 10:56:00: --- last message repeated 7 times ---

I had experienced the similar problem when I first upgraded to Leopard. The problem was caused by spotlight indexing my hard drive and at the same time Time Machine was trying to backup the spotlight index file. The solution was to temporary exclude most of the documents (I have a lot of pdf files) from spotlight and let it runs through the indexing process before starting Time Machine.
I don't know if my experience help you or not but it might be something worth looking into.
Good luck.

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