The following point is an excerpt from the symantec knowledge article http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/268665.htm

4. When using the exclude_list and the include_list, one should give significant thought and planning to the process.
Because of the way that NetBackup processes the information, it can add significant processing overhead to the backup.

Well, there is the documentation and then there is also experience :-)

Yes, the backup needs to process the exclude_list against the filelist found on the client. But computers are built to be able to do such processes. RIGHT?
On the other hand if 30 files are always active and you don't exclude them then the backup will slow down due to the constant retries of attempting to capture the files for the image.

If you have a lot of servers that you are backing up and using multiplexing then you will not see the difference of a client having 30 exclude statements or zero exclude statements even if you are backing up thousands of clients. Best practice is to try to expand the exclusion to the entire filepath\ filename.

Here is documentation directing to place the files in the exclude lists
In-depth Troubleshooting Guide for Exit Status Code 1 in NetBackup Server (tm) / NetBackup Enterprise Server (tm) 6.0
http://ftp.support.veritas.com/pub/support/products/NetBackup_Enterprise_Server/278554.pdf

Bob is absolutely correct in his analysis.  In addition to what he stated, I find exclude lists particularly useful in generating a status code 0 instead of a status code 1. 

This has the additional benefit of being able to explain things to (clueless) upper management types who seem to have nothing better to do than ask why all successful backups don't have a 0 completion code.  The time spent in getting to this point will be well worth the effort and soon you will have a set of exclude lists that can be applied to different backup clients by OS, application, etc.

No matter where I go, the Stumpr always comes to the rescue.  Thank you all for your responses.  As Stu52 suggested, I'm trying to come up with one global exclude list that I can add to my build documentation to have the server builders add the excludes at time of installation.  The way the clients are setup now, it seems like every other client has a different list of files and folders.