Unable to prevent Time Machine backing up volume mounted from sparsebundle

I have a password-protected sparsebundle that contains my financial files, private data, etc, which I mount as a volume at startup. It's about 8GB. If I'm going to be away from my computer for a bit, I'll unmount the volume as an extra security measure.
I don't need or want Time Machine to back up the files INSIDE the volume, just the sparsebundle itself. If I needed to access a backup of a file inside the volume, I'd rather just pull up an earlier version of the sparsebundle, mount it, and find the file in there.
However, I've recently discovered that I can't exclude the mounted volume from Time Machine backups in the usual way - the volume name is greyed out when I go through the System Preferences/Time Machine pane, and won't let me select it to be excluded from backup.
So what's happening is that TM is backing up the contents of the volume, which is showing up as folders on the TM backup drive. Inside these folders is the complete listing (and actual data) of all the files in my secured volume!
Even if I UNmount the volume from my system, it's still possible to access the data via Time Machine.app (and via Finder, on the TM backup disk).
So, essentially, even though I've password protected the sparsebundle CONTAINING the data, all a person needs to get the data is to have access to my user account on my Mac, and they can get the data via the above methods.
Is there any way to allow TM to back up the sparsebundle itself, but not the listing of the contents (and data) of the mounted image?
It seems odd that I can exclude the volume contents from being indexed by Spotlight, but can't exclude them from being specifically backed up by Time Machine.
Thanks in advance for any assistance!

I have exactly the same issue. I cannot exclude the content of mounted disk images from my backup using the GUI (strangely on my other computer the content is not backuped).
I have manually edited with a text editor the preference file (Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist) today (I am using 10.6.3) and added in the SkipPaths section the mounting point of the disk image (typically /Volumes/NameofDisk ). So far so good. The corresponding folder appears in the backup but is empty.
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