Peculiar booting issue... driving me insane!

Hi guys, OK so I've searched around, looked at the console output, uninstalled software, booted into verbose, user mode, repaired the disk with everything under the sun (booting from external OS X and running disk warrior like a billion times).. and yet I still have a very specific problem.

While its no way detrimental to the operation of my macbook its setting off my OCD on my otherwise perfect running OS X / WIN 7 MBP (unibody, late 2008).

OK So basically - my macbook always hangs on restart. BUT if I then hold down the power button - turning it off and then starting again - its fine! In other words, hard or cold boots are fine.

Also when I "alt" boot - that is I manually choose the start up disk, its fine also! So maybe there some error with choosing the startup disk (even though I went back and selected it multiple times).

I am basically calling it quits on trying to fix it (save nuking the HDD and installing again) - the work around is - boot into the start up disk option screen by default (the one when you hold alt after boot) - is there anyway to set this as the default behavior?

Cheers.

Have you tried resetting the PRAM as the startup sequence and disk is stored there.

To answer your question about setting the default behavior.... you can give rEFIt a try. A bit complex to get working right, but it will do what you ask. And it's free.

hey i tried resetting the PRAM, but the same issue... I logged in, restarted and it was stuck on with the apple logo and spinning wheel.

Actually it also froze on a cold boot yesterday, even after I manually selected the start up disk. But again power-off and power-on, and it was fine.

I have no idea whats going on, I might just have to live with it. :S