I have been having a similar situation--battery draining quickly over the course of the day. This morning I removed Firefox and Conversations widget (uninstalled both and rebooted) following some messages here. It didn't make any difference.

I wrote a script to record the battery percentage from lshal every 15 minutes. Two interesting things:

• The percentage shown did not seem to always gel with the battery indicator in the upper status bar. For example it went all the way down to 0 and stayed there while the battery indicator moved into the green again during charging
• The percentage seemed to (usually, but not always) drop steadily--about 1-2 percent every 15 minutes.

The second point was really what I was looking for, by the way...I thought that I was seeing a fast drain at particular times, but my logging script didn't bear this out. But the first point was actually more interesting.

In any case, I determined that removing Coversations and Firefox did not resolve the problem.

Now, following some more recent posts, I have disabled google talk and skype. I have also removed (but not uninstalled) the facebook and RSS widgets. (The RSS widget seems to update itself regularly even though I have set it not to do so.) If I get more than about 8 hours tomorrow, I'll see if I can winnow down any specific culprits.

Thanks to all the other posters for (hopefully) pointing me in the right direction.

P.S. Just imagine...I could be on an iphone and not have these problems--because I couldn't run widgets, have no access to the batteries, can only install apps as allowed, and would have no ability to run scripts to record any info. But I would have fart apps!