grub delaying up to a minute at boot, prior to cdrom spinup?

[rich]

I'm running grub 0.95, as ships with debian testing, on my laptop.  The
problem I have invovles my cdrom drive somehow.  Basically at bootup,
grub says 'loading grub' and then waits there (doing nothing) for up to
a minute before actually loading the boot menu.  I can make it go
instantaneously to the boot menu by ejecting the cdrom.  Any ideas what
would cause this?  The windows XP loader booted immediately, as did lilo
when I had that on.  Grub is installed to the mbr,
and /etc/boot/menu.lst looks like this:
   
default         3
timeout         5
color cyan/blue white/blue

title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.8-1-386
root            (hd0,1)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8-1-386 root=/dev/hda2 ro hdc=scsi-ide
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.8-1-386
savedefault
boot

title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.8-1-386 (recovery mode)
root            (hd0,1)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8-1-386 root=/dev/hda2 ro single
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.8-1-386
savedefault
boot

title           Other operating systems:
root

title           Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root            (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader     +1

I've posted on the debian mailing list but no-one had any ideas.  Any
offers?