Macbook Issues . . . again

Fun times here.

Yesterday my MacBook's power adapter said it was not charging -- or no light at all, as though there was no juice going through it. Then, at the same time, WoW started fscking up. To wit, in one place on a single gryffon flight path, the game would hard-crash . . . and at no other place I tried in the gameworld.

Went into troubleshooter mode on the MacBook: eliminated the power socket and adapter. Unit ran fine on AC only. Battery was at 191 charge / discharge cycles (about 2/3 of the service life) but fullcharge capacity was too low. Issue did not replicate with a replacement battery. Apple replaces these batteries free out of warranty or not within 2 years. A trip to the Genius Bar got a new battery; in the store it charged in my 'book.

The first time I plugged it in at home -- same issue. Battery stuck at 5% charge, does not charge . . . but system runs on AC only. The Mac Genius took a look at the system and told me it would not be economical to repair it at this time (has other issues with optical drive and top case cracks). The adapter light he says is a main logic board issue (The original MB doesn't have a dc-dc / dc-in board? . . . . Hmmm)

The MG in the Arden Fair store kept the new battery in my 'book for maybe 20 seconds. The issue appeared on my system right after boot up. I wonder . . . when a new battery is inserted and recognized, the system checks to see of the battery's firmware is up to date and if not runs the battery firmware updater. I'm starting to suspect bad firmware flash jobs killed the batteries. The test battery the MG tried was inserted for less than 20 seconds (update occurs after boot . . . ).

I think that the battery firmware was flashed by the updater, and there was a problem either with the firmware.

As for WoW, I can replicate the issue on that flight path with multiple toons on one realm. I've already run disk util, repaired permissions and the filesystem (no issues), tossed all custom UI config data for the wow client, tossed all character config data stored on the client, tossed the caches, pulled the client preferences. I'm going to try another computer with WoW loaded and see of the issue replicates. If no issues, then I uninstall and reinstall WoW and TBC on the MacBook. If there are issues, then I call Blizzard tech support. In that case it isn't my MacBook; may be server side data issues.