MacBook Pro Power Management Issues and "Broken" Bootcamp

Question

This is not a question but rather a solution I have discovered to a problem I have experienced many times now.
My Core 2 Duo 15" MacBook Pro (non-LED version) has exhibited several issues with the systems power management hardware.
Firstly: Occasionally the system will refuse to turn on. This has happened to me twice, it usually happens when I am running on just batteries. The very first time it happened I was in a meeting and had important data I had to get from the laptop, I was silently panicking. After swearing at my new 2.5 grand pride and joy, I happened to read an old support article relating to older PowerBooks which exhibited the same problems. Apple recommended taking the battery out and then holding the power button for several seconds and then reinserting the battery. This apparently resets the power management hardware feature -- and it worked, and has worked three times since.
Secondly: I have had a persistent problem when running Bootcamp. Sometimes the machine doesn’t go to sleep properly and although it everything looks right it continues to run (and perhaps, like me, you’ve backed it away in your bag and hence didnt notice it burning up. What has happened to me several times is that it literally "breaks" Windows XP. When you wake the computer or turn it back on (if the battery drained) then youll find Windows running PAINFULLY slow. If you press CTRL-ALT-DELETE (to bring up the task manager) I would see that the CPU is working very hard (at nearly full utilization) and it is so occupied that it won’t respond to anything I do at all. No matter what I did (I attempted a system restore, which was a two hour task with the computer running in its "broken" state) nothing would bring windows back to life. The first two times this occurred I was devastated because the only thing left for me to try was to remove the windows partition and install it fresh (thus losing all my files and settings -- although for the record you can still access the windows partitions files through Mac OS X). This ruined a near full day for me each time the computer did this (having a lot of settings and tweaks and installed programs to reapply). The third time this happened I did the "trick" listed above and reset the MacBook Pro's power management hardware. this has solved the problem ever since (two additional times now). I post this in case someone experiencing the same issue searches the forum.
I dont know the technical explanation but obviously there is an issue within this series of MacBook Pro's power management. Perhaps it relates to the "artificial" BIOS the system presents to windows through Apple's EFI system (Windows requires legacy BIOS to operate and all Intel Macs alternatively use EFI, so an extra "trick" had to be added by Apple for Windows to be compatible).

Answer 1

The computer. If two different batteries behave the same way it gives credence to possible issues with the power manager. You can try resetting it with:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303319
And verifying the firmware is up to date:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303880
And running the hardware test:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303081
If nothing seems to help, call AppleCare again, and tell them the battery replacement did not solve the problem and that you tried the above and tell them the results you got.