Grub Installation gets menu.lst wrong sometimes

This is not a new problem, and some other distros have it too.

My new 6.5.rc3_32 install wouldn't boot initially.
The operative menu.lst said look for things in (hd1,0).
I've been here before. I use grub's line edit to change this to (hd0,0) and it boots just fine. After I'm up and running I edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to say (hd0,0) instead of (hd1,0).
Things boot ok thereafter.

This trip should not be necessary.

I have three drives: sata hd on primary sata, ide hd and cdrw on secondary ide. These mount respectivly as sda, hdc and hdd. During install I ask for grub to be installed to MBR on the sata drive, which it is. There is enough here to expect grub to point to (hd0,0) in menu.lst, but it does not.

How do we get the grub installation process to get this right?
Do we complain to Ubuntu, or Debian, or what?