Thats not how mine worked. I put my study abroad trip to Europe on my Disney Visa card and all the points showed up when I did it.
I'm still paying it off (

) and I only get 1 reward point every month and I haven't been making $100 payments.
Also, I work for Chase. They're doing a lot of program changes because there are still a lot of different things being merged from Bank One. The branch I work at used to be a Bank One, so we get a lot of confused customers.
I don't really know much about the credit card side of things, as we only make payments-- not release information. But I imagine it's all pretty much the same sort of problems?