Time Machine can see my old backups, but not open them

I have been using Time Machine with a Time Capsule (1TB) since last June (on this machine) - quite a few backups in there.
Last night when I went to backup, first time in a few days, it said the machine had never been backed up and started the preparing the disk thing - I couldn't find a problem, everything looked fine on my time capsule - couldn't do anything else, so I let it run. This AM it had finished the backup (in fact several) and when I open Time Machine it shows me as having backups all the way to June '08 -- however, it cannot seem to open anything earlier than last nights -- if I try to scroll to them it greys out. If I try to directly click on one, I get an empty finder window that never seems to update (at least not for 5-10 min) and then I cannot get any response from anything, have to restart to get out.
There are two things that I can think of that could have caused this -- I updated to 10.5.6 since my last backup, and I backed up a second Mac to the same time capsule in the interim (that backup went fine and seems to be working, but very slow)
My console is not reporting any errors (for backup or for anything else). It would be nice to get back to my old files, it certainly seems to know they are there. Any thoughts?
thanks
Jim Hendler
RPI

I'm having this same issue and would like to know what I might be able to do.
I started using TimeMachine so that I could wipe my internal HD and be able to restore the settings. Now that I've wiped the HD TimeMachine doesn't seem to be doing what I expected it to do or I don't know how to restore the files.
Any help would be wonderful!

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