What to do with dead abandoned nickle metal AAs?

I helped my mom clean up her room and came upon her digital kodak camera. It has 1.7 amp hour aa nickle batteries, at least 12, 2 of their automatic chargers that holds 4 at once. Then 12 1.7 am hour energizer aa batteries and a square 4aa 18 hour battery charger for nicads and nickle metals.

Anyway, the kodak chargers would not charge or light up the indicator lights. I put them in the energizer charger and it appeared to work. 4 days later I had almost all batteries charged, at least according to a simple radio shack battery tester.

The kodak batteries died within a few minutes of using them in the camera. The energizer batteries I used in the kodak charger and were charged in a few hours. THey worked fine.

So? Are the kodak batteries gone? Will using them make them better?

Thanks.

You might want to try cycling them a few times and see if they improve in performance. Often even new batteries fully charged only power a digital camera a few minutes before dying.