In Lion, Time Machine seems to be perpetually running - and running slowly

Up through Snow Leopard, Time Machine did its incremental backup every hour quickly and stopped.
Since upgrading to Lion back in July, Time Machine seems be be running almost all the time - and very very very slowly. There doesn't seem to be any exessive Spotlight indexing going on anymore. That was long ago. So I don't think that's it.
Preparing for backup takes a long time. It take hours to eke through the backup itself, even if there weren't many changes, and finishing backup takes a long time.
I would say each backup, no matter how small, takes more than three hours.
At these forums there seems to be lots of discussion threads about this, and help pages linked to, but the suggested solutions seem to be a jumble, with some people saying they worked and many saying it didn't.
I did do a disk repair on the Time Machine volume just in case. And there is nothing else on that drive except for Time Machine backups. The drive is directly connected to my iMac (3.06 GHz Dual Core Duo, 12 GB RAM). While not vital, I'd rather not reformat the drive and lost all my old backups, which go back over a year. If I knew for sure that was the solution I'd do it. But in the discussions here there are people who seem to have tried that and reported back that it didn't help.
Right now it says it's backing up 3.5 MB of 132.9 MB - and taking forever to do it.
I know that since the last backup I haven't changed anywhere near 132.9 MB of data. Unless Lion is making massive behind-the-scene changes.
Something definitely seems to be wrong with Time Machine in Lion.
Have there been any additional thoughts on this? Is Time Machine just buggy in Lion?
Thanks,
doug

I feel ya, dawg, as they say. Right now I'm running a backup that has taken 43 minutes thus far. On an idle machine, it backed up 29.8 MB (17,949 files) followed by 19.5 MB (17,256 files). 12 min. for the first batch, 11 min., for the second. 13 min. of "Finishing backup" until it transitioned to "Cleaning up," which just completed after 12 min. Each backup typically goes 70–90 minutes. So backups are running for 65% – 80% of the time, if I leave TM running. I don't; instead, I turn on backups before going to bed, and turn them off on the first happy occasion when I notice that TM is idle.
TM backups have been behaving this way for about 2 months. Before that they were as speedy as Snow Leopard, for a couple of weeks. Before that they were taking 3 hours with the dreaded "Waiting for index to be ready" messge repeating for on hour or more. I fixed this latter problem by "trying everything" from http://pondini.org/TM/D2.html (a fine resource but, as you say, all over the map as all of the suggestions are).
TM in Lion is hosed. It's as simple as that.

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