This all sounds quite familiar. I've spent the last couple of months investigating battery 'problems' on my own machine (White macbook, early 2009). My original battery had well over 400 cycles on it and, of course, couldn't hold much of a charge. Checked into a replacement; Apple battery-$129, Chinese battery-$32. I opted for the Chinese battery, after all, a battery is a battery, right? My new Chinese battery worked great, 4+ hours of use on a full charge. Then at about 40 cycles or so it started acting really strange. Like it would charge up, then while using the machine on battery it would shut off and not start back up if you just put it to sleep. There where many different symptons. I of course I read all the forums and tried all the 'fixes'. No luck. Finally one day I got the dreaded 'X' through the battery icon and it would no longer charge. The interesting thing was that the machine was running on battery! Click on the battery icon - 'Power source: Battery---No Batteries installed'!! Your MacBook has what is called a Smart Battery. It has an embedded RISC micro and associated firmware (for a great bit of info on this, google 'charlie miller smart battery' and download the white paper). The bottom line is this: your Mac is constantly 'talking' to the controller in your battery. Even your Apple charger 'talks' to your battery, even when the machine is off. If the firmware in your battery says it thinks something is wrong, it will not let your charger or your mac get to the cells in the battery. In fact you will get a myriad of bizarre symptoms, many of which didn't show up until I installed Lion. So I took both batteries apart. DO NOT DO THIS UNLESS YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE DOING>This is for info only! Lipo cells are DANGEROUS! Hence the need for controller in the first place. First thing you will notice is that the board and associated components of the Chinese battery are not quite up to the standard of the Apple battery (I'm being polite here). You will also notice that the lipo cells are exactly the same brand and model # between the two batteries. So I remove the cells from the board in the Chinese battery and place them on a charger/analyzer made for lipo batteries. All the cells were in very good condition. I did what any old engineer would do-I installed the good cells into the old Apple battery and everything is working great. (One other note: If you check out replacement chargers for your Mac and decide to get one of those non-Apple chargers-do not leave it alone when its plugged in. Read about how many of these melt down or catch fire. Don't forget, even your charger 'talks' to your battery. That's how it knows what your battery is doing. That's the purpose of the middle pin on your magsafe connector) So if your MacBook is doing strange things related to power-try all the magic fixes like resetting the SMC and resetting PRAM. Not fixed yet? Try to find an Apple battery in a Macbook that is working properly and try it-chances are it will work in your machine. Also note that Apple made changes in Lion in regards to battery management. Many people have complained about reduced battery life when switching to Lion. It seems that when Lion is doing something that is cpu intensive that the processor gets hotter than what your used to. (Heat=greater battery consumption) This will happen when you first install Lion and it is going through the process of indexing all the files. This is just speculation on my part but I'm thinking that Lion is checking things in your batteries firmware that previous versions of the OS did not. This may be in an effort to thwart the sale of off-brand batteries. Your smart battery has a couple of passwords that are needed to set different 'states' in your battery controller. Read Mr. Millers paper on Smart Batteries and you'll see that Apple leaves these passwords at their default. It has been said that the folks programming the after-market batteries change these passwords. Thus, a battery firmware update from Apple will certainly fail when it encounters one of these batteries. I hope that my experience here will shed some light on the subject of battery problems with MacBooks. Be sure to completely eliminate any question of the integrity of your batteries firmware before going off and changing your motherboard! Your Macbook battery is not just 6 lipo cells hooked up to a connector. It has an intelligent controller between your machine and those cells and it can present a lot of bizzare symptoms when it 'thinks' something is wrong with the cells-keeps your MacBook from going up in flames! Good Luck