I hate to resurrect a past thread, but I finally found the solution to my problem. I would have gotten to it sooner, but one of my drives on my desktop (my startup drive with all my stuff) decided to go wonky. Took a couple days to go through the retrieve & repair operation for that, which just killed my motivation for a while there.

Also, it took me a while to find one at a decent enough price ($30.00 plus shipping is just too darn expensive for me at this stage), but I did finally find a replacement inverter board on eBay. Pulled the machine apart, made the switch... and now it works great again. Now I can get back to that darn battery problem, as well as move on to the other pressing things on my list.