Suggestions for trouble shooting?

So my 2009 MBP has been acting weird lately.

Almost every time I put it to sleep, it won't go to sleep, so I open it later and the battery has drained down to 0%.

Today, twice I closed it and the battery didn't drain, but it didn't start up like usual. Instead, it started up as if the battery was drained, with the greyish screen and the bars on the bottom slowly going white (I don't know how to explain that. It's the countdown mechanism when you drain the whole battery) until it is fully operational.

Then, 5 minutes ago, it just suddenly shut off.

Any suggestions for trouble shooting? I'm going to reset the SMC. Any other thoughts?

Resetting the SMC should be the first step. If that doesn't help, you might want to download the free coconutBattery 2.8 from here and let it analyze your battery.

I reset SMC. But i have the same problem that I put my computer in sleep but instead of quickly waking it, it woke up slowly as if the battery had drained out with the bars slowly filling in white on the bottom. That said, the battery was fine once fully booted. Ideas?

Next step is to run Disk Utility and verify your hard drive. You didn't mention which version of OS X you're running... so it will either be from your startup disk or recovery partition.

I ran Disk Verify....and it checked out as OK. new thought?

Did you run from Recovery or the OS X.6 DVD?

I ran it from Disc Utility. I dont have the discs on me this second. Should I try to do that instead?