I never had a problem back in the day when I had that type of camera. Who knows maybe I am suffering from amnesia. If you are having so much trouble with it, and you are spending so much money on batteries. Maybe you should consider buying a new camera. There are some nice ones that are not that expensive and charging the batteries is not a huge deal.
By the way, thanks for the links to those sites. It will definitely help me with my future batteries shopping trips.