Early 2008 mac pro won't boot from hdd when ssd is installed

I have Mountain Lion 10.8.3 installed on my 1TB HDD in my early 2008 mac pro.  That is the only OS install on my mac.  I have an OWC SSD formatted but left as an empty drive that I am trying to use but when it's installed my mac hangs on the blank gray screen.
My mac cold boots fine and runs fine when the SSD is *not* installed.  When I shut down and put the SSD into a drive bay the mac does seem to boot ok the first time, but when the computer is off for a while it will not boot.  It just hangs on the blank gray screen (no apple logo).    As soon as I pull out the SSD, the computer boots fine and runs fine again.  I am not trying to boot off the SSD, I am booting off the HDD.  The correct drive (1tb hdd) is selected in startup disk.
OWC has been helping me and I have tested 3 SSD's.  So it does not appear to be a problem with their drive.
The mac will boot into safe mode with the SSD installed.  It will boot if I choose the boot drive with the option key at startup.
Mountain Lion was clean installed.
Could it be some sort of library pref or cache issue?
Any recommendations on what to try?

A HT does not find a lot of errors.
It doesn't look for bad sectors or directory or file problems.
Clone your SSD now that you have a clean OS and has the Apple updates on it. Before you make changes.
Install TRIM Enabler 2.2+ on it and any boot volume, to enable TRIM and so that Disk Utility's Repair Disk will trim cells. Mountain Lion Recovery won't  which is a shame, so...
Clone and keep bootable backup clone of your system to use for maintenance.
A really bad directory on a system drive will cause interference from booting.
SSDs really need extra care, and even with TRIM, to be repaired from time to time and couple times a year, to do an erase and restore from a current image.
Of course Mac OS system even iwth apps is small and doesn't need to have any data or media and fits on 120GB usually just fine and still have a good enough amount free so TRIM and Garbage Collection can work properly and not get low on free pages. But 20GB free should be the minimum free, and better to have more, at least whatever total amount is written out in a month.

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