Why does my Mac Pro always power-up to the recovery partition?

I have a "classic" Mac Pro, I suppose, since it dates from about 2008 - Xeon dual core, though with 10G of RAM.
I installed Lion and everything works fine, except for one thing: whenever I power-up, I start up in the recovery partition. That doesn't actually bother me a lot, but it prevents my wife from using the computer if it's powered off.

Pram reset did the trick. Oddly, I've had my Pro for several years now and this is the first time I remember having to zap the PRAM.
My son (an Apple tech) was nearby today and told me that PRAM Reset (command-option-P-R all held down just before the chime and released after the chime) is the canonical solution for odd boot behavior.
Regarding other suggestions: yes, I did indeed open the Startup Disk selection in the System Preferences. It provided exactly one choice: my legitimate boot disk. Yes, I clicked on it anyway, even though it was the one that was selected already. No, it didn't make a difference.
Perhaps if I had had a choice of bootable disks I might have been able to switch between them and make the problem go away. But I only had one bootable disk to choose from.
I don't use Boot Camp, I run Windows through VMWare.

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