Cannot Complete Backup - Never have in 10 tries.

[neuralgia]

I downloaded Super Duper as an Intel native replacement for Retrospect. It seems faster, more Mac like and all the rest BUT I can't buy yet because:

It cannot complete a full backup. I strongly suspect permissions are to blame, but I have set it to automatically repair permissions and have done so from root using Disk Utility as well as Onyx.

Worse, sometimes it thinks it is still working, chugging away on file 286,789 out of 368,910 or whatever number and when trying to stop or quit I get a crash. Because of this I haven't been able to send error emails or copy the text. Any attempt to open TextEdit, Word, BBEdit, etc after Super Duper fails is fine, I can paste the log text but I try to save the file and my external drive spins up and the program crashes. Also cannot eject the external drive without a restart.

This is a MacBook 13" 2 GHZ w/ 10.4.7. It occurs when running Path Finder and in Finder, and logged in as root or as regular administrative user. External is Acomdata FW 400 60 GB.