hey, im not to sure how much help that this could be, but, i was having the same isssue as you hurmzz (kinda).
I know that this isnt the best thing for it, but usualy i keep my laptop plugged in most of the time. one day after getting home i played around on my laptop and got some work done, when i realized that the battery was getting a little low i plugged it back in (it was around 35%) and left it be while i got some other things done, when i came back i didnt see the charge light on so i assumed that it was fully charged. seeing as how i work where it was plugged in i didnt unplug it to work. sometime after i realized that windows (XPsp2) was reading the battery as full (the icon said running off ac power, nothin about charging like it normally does) but... the batteries power was still only at like 35%. this had me a little nervous so i looked into it...
saddly your problem was one of the few problems like this that i found. a few places reported that buying a new battery would solve the problem but the battery is only a few months old so i continued looking into the issue. one thing that you may want to try is check your battery- if you havent bought a battery and yours doesnt work yet then you may have a bad battery. i got out an old multimeter and tested my battery... it read at 11.3 volts- it was only rated for 10.8 im not sure if this small voltage difference would have made a difference but about two days after that reading the battery started charging again. maybe your battery is doing something that makes the laptop see it as dangerous for the system.
About jiggling the cord to get the battery to charge- not sure how that would affect it, not saying your lying, just sounds unusual. i have heard that some of these batteries will charge for around 30 seconds before they quit again, maybe your original battery had a problem like that and jiggling it was cutting the power shortly and acting like it was being plugged in and unplugged.
As for the second battery not working, a few battery problems i heave heard about were more the fault of the laptop. one thing... make sure that your battery is getting proper contact to the laptop, if its not all touching then power cant flow to it (if you were jiggling with a little force u moved the battery?) also there have been some problems in the bios or somethin, if you still are going crazy trying to fix the issue try lookin up something along those lines on google.
Im sorry if anything that i posted is incorrect but im just tryin to pass along anything that helped me. if anyone comes by and notices somethins wrong leave it up, i get the feeling that this has happened to alot of other people who havent posted about it