Time machine keeps growing in size or backing up a size far greater than it

Apologies if this is covered elsewhere but after hours of searching I still haven't been able to find a resolution which is actually fixing my problem.
When my time machine tries to back up the size of the back up just keeps growing and growing - a problem which has been reported several times but none of the solutions are fixing the problem for me. I've completely reset time machine (disconnect external hard drive, deleting the preferences from ~library/preference, then reset up with my exclusions) and the problem just reappeared.
I've gone through this routine several times and in most cases had no joy. On one occasion I thought the problem had been resolved as it did the initial backup and then a couple of hourly backs and then suddenly it returned a message saying it had insufficient space (trying to back up 470GB but disk only has 300GB available) which was just ridiculous as the full back up size was under 50GB.
I've verified the disk on several occasions and it always comes up clean. In a fit of desperation I've even tried reformatting the external drive with no improvements
I'm at the point of deleting time machine from my laptop and going back to the old Backup program. Can anyone offer any thing else I could try.

Hi, and welcome to the forums.
Have you Verified your internal HD (and Repaired any externals that are also being backed-up)?
If so, it's probably something damaged or corrupted in your installation of OSX. I'd suggest downloading and installing the 10.6.4 "combo" update. That's the cleverly-named combination of all the updates to Snow Leopard since it was first released, so installing it should fix anything that's gone wrong since then, such as with one of the normal "point" updates. Info and download available at: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1048 Be sure to do a +Repair Permissions+ via Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder) afterwards.
If that doesn't help, reinstall OSX from your Snow Leopard Install disc (that won't affect anything else), then apply the "combo" again.

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