Acer 3000 battery (by 2 users)

hey, I have an acer aspire 3000 with your same issue (computer won't run unless battery is disconnected), however it works perfectly fine in safe mode. I did install XP and it worked perfectly fine, but when I did the SP3 update that's when it would freeze upon normal boot (the clock worked normally, but the keyboard and touchpad froze). I suspect this is and isuse with one of the updates, which kinda sucks. Let me know if the new battery solves the problem, otherwise I think it's some kind of a software conflict causing a hardware failure.