Lost disk space - how do I recover it?

Let's do the math:
My iMac's hard drive ends up being around 605gb.
With Snow Leopard, and all my documents, the free HD space has been around 500gb.
With XP installed on a partition, the free HD space is 465gb in total. That seems about right.
Recently, however, I've noticed that my free HD space is close to 260gb. That means that nearly 200gb is unaccounted for, and I'm trying to track down the problem. I've cleaned cache, rebooted, and cleared the log files.
Are there any good ways to figure out where the disk space has gone - and how to get it back?
Thanks!

Using your instructions, Terminal yielded these results. My user name is replaced here with (username).
Last login: Sat Feb 6 14:36:16 on ttys000
adsl-71-141-123-132:~ (username)$ ls -Al /Volumes/
total 8
*lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Feb 6 13:51 DISK -> /*
d--x--x--x+ 9 root admin 306 Feb 5 11:02 G-DRIVE
adsl-71-141-123-132:~ (username)$
The DISK entry is for my computer, and the G-Drive for my backup disk. But since the former was not appended with a "d", I don't detect an error - or at least, Terminal doesn't.
I deleted the XP partition from my HD just in case, but still end up with these results:
Capacity: 639GB
Used: 342.81GB
Available: 296.98GB
I should have about 460GB available, by my latest count.

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When I deleted the Previous Systems file it was about 7 months after the Leopard installation.
You are right, I did do an Archive and Install in order to maintain all my info from v10.4.9.
The problem I encountered after I deleted the Previous Systems file was I then did a Secure Empty Trash and as it was emptying it was showing over 200,000 items and still upticking and that worried me that I had done the wrong thing by deleting the Previous Systems file.
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The world sign again flashed on, but this time for maybe only 10 minutes before it booted OK.
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But I do notice a definite increase in speed using 10.5.1 compared to 10.5.5. Those Security Updates have dragged it down badly.
Now that you have explained that the Previous Systems file may be safely deleted then I will try that again and let it run its course this time.
I'll let you know what happens.
Thanks again,
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Lost disk space - how do I recover it?

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