Mac Newbie TM & Spotlight issues

Hi All,
I got my new iMac on 21 September 2012.  I have a NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive on my Netgear DGN 2200 router which Spotlight never really managed to index - it always estimates a huge amount of time and even if I let it go it doesn't get it done. 
When I started TM backup it extimated about a month and I let it go because I thought it would figure out that it was a new / empty machine quite quickly and the estimate would come down.  After two days and only 2-3GB backed up I stopped it and deleted all of the backup data and started again.  Same issue.
Then I turned off spotlight and eventually got a week-long backup done. 
I then updated to 10.7.5 supplemental upgrade which apparently fixes long TM backup issues. 
Now, with spotlight turned back on TM has been taking forever with its incremental backups.  For example, I turned it on an hour ago and opened pages & Chrome, then it started a backup 50 minutes ago.  It says "Backing up: 116.6 MB of 116.6 MB" but it's still going 50 MINUTES later!!!  update: 75minutes later
Spotlight is still not indexing my external storage which is an issue because I have all of my work on the external.
I have been trawling through this forum but being a mac newbie I don't understand all of the jargon - sudo this and that, and if I get a solution it does need to be step by step.  I have always been tinkering around under the hood of previous M$ machines and would be a 'power-user' so I'm not stupid but it's a whole new language for me.
Should I upgrade to Mountatin Lion?
Is there any way I can downgrade to 10.6?
Is there any way to search without using spotlight?  On the pc I used to be able to search non-indexed locations, it would just take a little while.
Time Machine is not trying to backup my NAS drive is it?  From my understanding it doesn't do that but maybe it's confused ... ???
Thanks for your help.

I don't use raid myself so I'll leave that explanation to others. I configure my Mac Pro with 4 drives. My main drive is my boot drive and has about 300+ gigs free. I have a backup drive for that which I use SuperDuper for backup, creating a fully bootable backup drive in the event my main drive has a problem. I only back up to that drive when my machine is "good and solid". That allows me to throw on the most recent update without much concern. If there is a problem then I just boot from my backup drive and I'm back up and running just fine. I also use the backup of my main drive for my Final Cut Pro scratch drive. I copy the files for my movies to external drives for archive when needed. For my data drives I use another set of 500 gig drives. One for data (mostly photos) and one to backup using superduper whenever I feel like it. You could automate it all with Retrospect for the data drives if you wanted to. I don't think Retrospect will make a bootable backup of a main drive. I use Western Digital WD5000KS ddrives, 500 megs each. They make another model for those wanting RAID. Set up RAID, by all means, if squeeking every ounce of speed is your goal to be sure. My setup is conservative, redundant and very safe. A simple search here or on google for RAID0 or such will turn up much info on raid configuations.

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