Thanks all,
I am on the latest version of Mountain Lion (boy was that a mistake

My Outlook is now a disaster) and ran the verify disk process. Hard disk is OK, did repair permissions and ran the verify option against the TM backup which took almost overnight. There was no error message, but at some point the verify stopped and a backup started - I'm at 3GB of 73GB, so it should be done sometime next week

....and if I need to reboot my computer, it gets to start over again

(