Maybe a Lenovo T61 will do you well, they are fairly popular for being business class notebooks that are very durable. Get the 14.1" screen with maybe a 9 cell battery and that should do you good for an entire day of lectures. The T61's aren't meant for gaming but that shouldn't be a problem...
I went to my local CC and looked for Guild Wars because pxc's post in the other thread said that Guild Wars Nightfall Collector's Edition was $9.48. I got there and it was $70. Not sure if thats an old price tag. Oh well
I own a Zune 80 and I don't think you can use the touch feature to seek through music, it only lets me skip to the next song. But what you can do is set the genre of your 9 hour long song to "Podcast" and have the Zune software treat it as an audio podcast, with it being a podcast you can use...
As for your battery, you could try following this metacafe video about "hacking" your battery http://www.metacafe.com/watch/479447/laptop_battery_hack_dont_buy_a_new_one/ I tried to do the same as the video but I could not open my battery easily (old compaq presario laptop battery)
For the...
Oh wait, I take back what I said about RAM not being upgradeable. http://www.eeeuser.com/2007/09/11/confirmed-by-asus-eee-pc-ram-will-be-replaceable/
There is one slot that you can stick in up to 1 gig.
Not sure where you're getting your facts from but two websites that are currently taking deposits for the EEE have different specs than you describe.
http://www.allasus.com/CATALOG/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=eee&osCsid=0064e1140394534a675fffbbb506e534...
I don't know what you are going to be using the laptop for but if I were to get one now, I would get this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16834220104 . The Asus A8JP.
I think you can upgrade ram, hard drive, cpu, and maybe video card.