Ok, I went in and poked around 3 of my Lombards, and after switching RAM in and out, found out

a) I had one stick of bad RAM

B) my new, whizzy Addonics compact flash adapter drive thingee does *not* support switching out the batteries. It just dies mid-swap.

So, now I can switch batteries on two of the Lombards. I really like the compact flash card drive, so I guess I'll leave that in there and suffer without switching out the battery.