Battery failure on T6x.... Irreparable Damage

[DAH]

If you do some reading one common failure on the T6x is the 9 cell battery. One day you simply get a message to the effect that the battery no longer can be charge. Often this occurs on a battery that was reading good the day before. ThinkPad battery will not charge or discharge and gives an "Irreparable Damage" error message

What I seem to see, is this is much more likely to occur on a machine that is seldom use on battery power. Now normally these batteries are cover under the battery recall program. But I know someone with a T43 that has a three year old battery that still works, that has always been in the machine, and that has only a handful of cycles on it. It would appear to me that many users here have experienced the 'battery can no longer be charge failure" that perhaps it is more likely to be caused by charging under Vista, than XP.

Has anyone actually taken a failed pack apart? Do we know what has truly failed? This mode of failure is not technically covered by the last recall, but far more people appear to being experiencing the irreparable damage failure than having their batteries burst into flames. In fact so many have experienced this error that IBM no longer calls it this but now calls it, "A battery error has occurred. The battery cannot be charged. Replace the battery."