[wtallis]

It sounds like you've got a lot more problems with your macs than most. I'd like to know what kind of third-party software you've got running.

On my macs, Flash will regularly eat my cursor, and jitouch and my Wacom drivers can occasionally interfere with my keyboard or cause recent versions of iTunes to crash, but none of these require a reboot, and usually don't even require me to log out to recover.

Your MBP clearly needs a new battery if your machine dies when it's still at 20-30%. I bet if you went to the power section of System Profiler, you'd see see the full charge capacity of your battery is less than one fourth of its rated capacity. I once abused a battery so badly that its full charge capacity was less than one tenth of its rated capacity. (Oddly enough, this was partly due to Windows, but that's a story for another day.)