In the meantime, since that version of grub, 0.97-30 has the known bug that running grub-update changes hdd location descriptions, the subscibers need to know not to use that version from debian unstable.
The question, on a different level, could be re-phrased as to why it takes udevd more than twenty-five seconds to populate when booting via lilo, since both boot loaders should work. An eternity when one boots the laptop five times a day....
That is why I suppose the ski patrol runs the slopes before the public ;) and we run experimental partitions.....
Thanks again for the immense amount of work you do to give all of us a totally reliable distro.