Grub not obeying conf

[Petrus de Calguarium <kwhiskerz gmail com>]

I have a freshly installed x86_64 f11alpha system.

There is a small glitch in grub that I cannot figure out.

The grub.conf says hidden and timeout=5, but the menu is NEVER hidden (not 
even on the very first boot after installation from DVD), and the timeout 
doesn't work (nothing happens EVER, unless I hit return).

How do I get the menu hidden and the timeout honoured?