New unibody macbook pro time machine backup stalling/stalls

I have been using time machine to back up my Macbook Pro 17 (First Gen), I have 2 external Western Digital Drives connected via USB in a RAID (Striped) Configuration. Everything has worked fine for months and the backups are quite snappy...
I just changed to a NEW Unibody Macbook Pro 17 and formatted the drives, set up the RAID configuration again from fresh in disk utility and reset Time Machine and said OK when it requested to use the drive for backups.
The process gets some way into backing up... sometimes 7GB, 13GB, 17GB even 70GB and then just stops. The hard drives(at least one of them anyway i cant tell exactly) spin down and the file count in Time Machine window just stops. There is no error message and the window just stays there saying its backing up but there is no external HD activity. I have to cancel the backup (which sometimes - but not always - causes everything to stall until i unplug the drives by whipping the USB cable out). Everything then works fine i dont need to restart and it just brings up an error message saying that Time Machine failed to backup...
Any ideas??
I do have antivirus software installed (VirusScan) but i have had that on my previous machine aswell so it cant be that...

I have a MacBook C2Duo (black 2008) customer who has upgraded to 10.5.7 with a new internal and external hard disk and a fresh install of the OS. After doing this, Time Machine constantly stalled at 12.55 GB when backing up to an external disk (USB2). After a lot of reading on the net, I think the problem marks the re-emergence of an old bug where the mdworker task used by Spotlight to index drives is crashing and starting to take up to 99% of the CPUs. At this point, TM simply does not have enough CPU time to work and crawls almost to a halt.
I messed around for a while with Activity Monitor watching the mdworker crash and it is very predictable. Time Machine buddy does not pick it up because of course TM is still working albeit at a snail's pace.
Since mdworker is very associated with Spotlight, I tried setting Spotlight to not index any folders—same problem.
Finally, I set the TM destination drive to be a Private drive in the Spotlight Preferences and it finished without an mdworker crash.
It might be a temporary workaround or it might be coincidence that TM worked this time, so YMMV and Apple should look at this too.

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