Hmmm. In my case, I've had just the opposite experience. Up until the most recent SSU (43-7) my battery would die sometimes after just a couple of hours. But it wasn't consistent. Sometimes I'd get a day or so, other times, less than half a day (even with networking shut down).

Now, since the latest SSU my battery life is back to normal. The only thing I can think of is that before the SSU I had screen rotation enabled which meant I was using a modified kernel. Since I really didn't use the screen rotation feature that often, I've decided not to tinker with the kernel this time. We'll see what happens.