Mike - There's nothing wrong with backing up symbolic links, per se. Don't get into the bad habit of arbitrarily excluding things from backup: our responsibility as TSM administrators is to get a full image of client data to allow for a later, full recovery.
Pursue the actual issues there. If there are bad symbolic links, ferret them out and have them corrected or deleted. If mysteries remain, post details, including error messages from the backup and dsmerror.log. As it stands now, we have no real idea what the problem is. Richard Sims