Leopard fails on Restart, then hold Option Key

I have Leopard on my Mac HD, and 10.4.10 on an external firewire drive. When I first installed Leopard, I made sure that I could boot to Tiger by choosing Restart on the Apple menu, and holding down the Option key, be given a choice as to which volume to start up from. All this worked until I installed the upgrade to 10.5.1.
Now, I have repaired the volumes Mac HD and the one with the Tiger operating system, using the Leopard and Tiger install disks respectively. Then when I try to restart and hold the Option key, I do get to the screen where the two volumes show up as choices, but the little watch icon that indicates that the system is busy NEVER stops turning, even for a half-hour or more. So it never turns into a cursor that I can use to select my 10.4.10 volume and restart from there.
I can use the startup disk System Pref panel to specify the next startup volume, and it does boot successfully into Tiger or Leopard. But the restart with Option Key method never works.
Besides using disk utility to check the two volumes, is there anything else I can or should try to fix this problem, or it is a known Leopard bug?

That worked!
Interestingly, on the Applecare phone line, a guy told me that creating an 'empty' test account to test all this was unnecessary, because at the level of being between boots, choosing a volume, the user account had no influence or relevance. But apparently, what was going on before the restart does have an influence.
Now that I am back on Leopard, having done a safe boot again, i am going to operate a bit as I usually do, email, browser, etc., and then see of the safe boot still makes the restart/option key work.

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