Well, best thing I can say is that there is no way you did this by hooking up jumper cables. If your wife's car had put out enough power to do that, than her's would be screwed as well. But, really, if such a phenomenon were to happen, a fuse would go first (unless of course we are talking about lightning-like power here which would just leap across the fuses).

Anyway, this is quite strange, but I agree a bit with the other poster. My car was doing very funky things when something was wrong with the battery. I replaced the battery and everything was fine.

I would go to the store you bought it at and talk them into at least letting you try another one. Just be careful not to ding up the posts so they can put it back on the shelf if it doesn't fix your problem.