Help! Ball Nut Catastrophe

Well, my curiosity got the best of me. I was cleaning a greasy,
rusty linear lide with a nice ball screw and nut and decided the nut
needed cleaning also (it nor the screw is rusted, i was just trying
to remove old grease). i have never worked with ball screws and did
not know that the ball were ready to jump out at me when i removed
it. i scratched my head, cleaned the nut and all the balls and
figured it couldn't be that hard to get them back in there properly.
After about the 10 disassembly/reassembly i have resorted to this
global request for help. the problem is that when i reassemble and
put all of the balls in the nut and some in the tube that runs
diagonally along the outside of the nut and fasten it in place and
grease it, the nut spins freely a few turns then binds. some of the
balls will even escape the nut through the felt wiper. the screw is
parallel with the travel of the slide also. before i ever removed
the nut from the screw the motion was flawless. is there some secret
to this or have i cost myself serious dollars. surely getting the
balls to run the internal race correctly isn't impossible. please
help.
Thanks, gene