Removed XP, now upon startup a folder with a ? appears prior to apple logo

Hello,

I had recently installed XP (using Boot Camp) onto my wife's MacBook. She decided that she did not like using XP on her MacBook for various reasons and so I uninstalled XP using the Boot Camp utility which also removed the HD partition.

Now when the computer starts up, there is a gray "folder" icon with a "?" inside it, which then disappears after about a second and then the normal gray "apple" icon appears and the computer boots normally. How do I get it to stop making that "folder" icon?

Also, I am wondering why the default mode for a MacBook with XP installed is to boot into XP if you forget to hold down "alt" while booting. Can it be changed to default to OSX instead?

Go to System Preferences -> Startup Disk and select your OS X folder

The reason why the computer showed the ? folder is because it was trying to boot into XP (because it was selected in either XP or OS X to be the default) before trying to get into OS X.

Yes, that was the issue. Thanks for the help!