After 10.5.6, external drives cause boot to hang

When I boot my iMac, it hangs with the grey apple on a white screen of I have external firewire drives attached. It never gets to the point where the little gear starts revolving. When I unplug the drives, the boot goes to completion.
After booting, I can use any number of external firewire drives with no problems. All of my drives have passed Disk Utility checks.
I have several firewire 400 and one firewire 800 drive, all cause the same problem. I have tried resetting the firmware, which doesn't help.

Sorry, my posting indicated in the section below about my machine, that I use 10.5.5, but I use 10.5.6.

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