I installed Mac OS X Leopard back in November, and up until the end of January I'd been getting reliable backups from Time Machine. At that point, for some reason, it stopped working silently and I found out about it with a message dialog 10 days later. Coincidentally, shortly thereafter I needed to completely restore from backup. So, 10 days in the past was better than nothing, and that restore worked.
Since then, though, I can't seem to get Time Machine working again after the restore. I've tried via AFP network share, I've tried with a drive hooked straight up to the machine, I've wiped all existing backups and tried starting with a fresh drive—basically I feel like I've tried every combination afforded by the black box, and it always seems to fail partway through.
Today, this is the cherry on top: