Thanks for such an overwhelming response. I have found from my research that none of the methods to find back links are 100% accurate and none of the webmaster tool from any search engine will give you a correct estimation. The Yahoo site explorer however gives correct estimation to some extent.
I do have SEO Spyglass and it is quite expensive....If you know any free tool like that it will surely help the community.
i use http://webseoranks.com, it gives me alot of stats about a website including backlink count from google,yahoo and alexa