I've been burned multiple times by rayovac so they have lost my business for good. I bought the renewals when they first came out in the early 90's while I was in college the store I worked for had some really good coupons. I learned to not let them discharge very far and got a couple good years of use from them. Then the charger died so I had to buy another charger. Then a set leaked and ruined a flashlight. Then the new charger died.
Then I started on NiMH in the late 90's and early 2000's. The last renewal charger I had bought would charge both so I was using I for some of my nimh as well until it died. Then I bought a new rayovac nimh charger but the renewal chargers were non existant so I had to toss a whole bunch of renewals and replace them with nimh. Then my nimh started lasting less and less and we were getting frustrated that the digicam would shut down after just a few pictures. I quit using re-chargeables completely and was buying lithium for the hungry digicam.
I then started researching and found out my nice $30 rayovac charger didn't completely charge the batteries so having a fresh off the charger battery that only had 70%-80% capacity. So I bought a decent charger and was able to get all the old batteries working and lasting their normal time.
Then I started buying bulk packs of Alkaline for my gear and as backups. The bulk packs of rayovac were a good price but I started getting leaky batteries right in the pack that were 6 months old as I would buy a new pack and rotate every 6 months.
During this time I also started hearing about low self discharge nimh so I wanted to try them. Sanyo Eneloop was one of them but wasn't out in stores yet and rayovac hybrid was another. I started looking for those and it turned out they had an exclusive deal with walmart for the first year so to buy them I'd have to shop at a terrible store. I ended up waiting for eneloops to come into the stores and they were cheaper than the rayovacs at one store anyway. So I'd stopped buying rayovac and the bulk packs of energizer or duracell Alkalines havent leaked yet and my NiMH are still lasting like they should so I sold the crappy rayovac charger on ebay.
I'll give a company the benefit of the dought, every company makes a bad product every once and a while or comes out with a stupid policy but when they repeatedly have issues they hit my don't deal with list. So rayovac made it there along with AOL, Yahoo, Time Warner, Nextel, Spitzer Dodge, Fram, Apple, etc.