Does Degrader cause a softboot? If so, have you tried holding down the mouse button to disable the 020 during that boot?
Also, in the early startup menu, are you just hitting spacebar to switch to PAL or actually going into the display menu to pick PAL? Hitting the spacebar only puts the early startup menu in PAL mode, upon booting past it it switches to whatever mode is selected in the display settings menu, which by default is of course NTSC.
