MacBook shuts down instead of sleeping when battery low

Like many people, I had the infamous MacBook sudden shutdown problem where my MacBook (original model) would suddenly shut down wihtout warning regardless of if it was running off battery or AC adapter. I took the MacBook into the Apple store, they did their magic, and two weeks later an updated MacBook was shipped to me, free of the problem. I also applied the firmware update when it came out.
Now I have a new problem...it's that the MacBook doesn't seem to want to sleep when the battery gets low. Instead, it will suddenly shut down without warning. In the past, I seem to recall that it would give alerts saying that my power was low, and eventually force itself to sleep. However, now the battery can be as high as 15-20% and the MacBook will shut down. This never happens when the battery is not on the low side, so I'm wondering if this is a problem with the MacBook guaging how much power it has left. Sometimes, I notice that when I plug it in and reboot, the battery says it is at 0%, even though it clearly was not prior to the shutdown (though that didn't happen just now when it shut down - when I rebooted after connecting the AC adapter, it was at 15%).
I tried resettting the SMC firmware, which seems to help transietly, but the problem recurs. 90% of the time I use my computer plugged in, so that's why I've not noticed it much

The same thing happened to me last night -- the Macbook shut down because of low battery instead of sleeping, and it gave no warning messages at all as the battery power got low.
I never had the sudden shutdown problems, though.
I also checked the battery capacity with CoconutBattery, and it reported that the Max Battery Capacity was 4105 mAh, which is only 78% of the battery's original max capacity. Today, CoconutBattery reports that the battery's max capacity is 5035 mAh (96% of original capacity), which is more reasonable for a laptop less than a year old.
Perhaps resetting PRAM or the Power Management Unit could solve this problem.
Any experts out there with a solution?
MacBook   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

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