MacBook Pro :: Installing Second Drive SSD - System Hangs

I have a 13" mid 2009 MBP and due to issues with the superdrive I decided to buy the OWC data doubler kit and install it with a 120GB SSD from them. I also upgraded to 8GB RAM at the time but I do not believe that has anything to do with this. After I did this, my original HD freaked out and wouldn't even show up in target disk mode. Eventually I made a clone of the Snow Leopard install disks onto a USB stick using a friend's laptop and installed OSX fresh onto the SSD. Luckily I had a backup of everything so I have not lost anything. Even with the fresh install, however, I am having a lot of issues with the OS. When I try to boot the machine, it often takes 3, 4 or even 5 times to boot normally. As far as I remember, booting into safe mode works right away but that is obviously not a solution. Usually it starts by hanging at a blue screen once or twice, then I can get to the login screen but it is either kind of grayed out or it just freezes and I can't even move the mouse to type in my password. When I do safe mode it boots up without this issue, but even after that I often see the computer freeze up during use, which happened the first time I wrote this post. This problem also occurs when waking up from sleep. If the laptop goes to sleep by itself or I close it, I have to power cycle it to return to use. The keyboard will light up, but the screen never comes on so there is no way for me to log in. These issues are extremely frustrating and make me feel dumb for doing this in the first place, considering that everything worked ok before(minus the superdrive). Has anyone seen these issues before? Resetting PRAM and booting into single user mode are not helpful, I have tried them many, many times and I see the same issues. I saw somewhere else that I should try to remove the fonts, startup items, and loginwindow.plist files/folders and put them on the desktop, but even after doing that the issues persist.