Warm Standby looking for already applied log files

We have a two Postgres servers running 8.3 set up for warm standby using xlog shipping.  We had some problems with our warm standby locking up and needing to be rebooted and have grub reinstalled for the system to boot.  Once the server was back up we noticed the xlog file it was looking for was one that the logs say was already applied.  It was 7 xlogs back to be exact.  We have our log shipping target replay the xlogs and then delete them when it is done so we don't have these old 7 to move back so Postgres can replay them.  Is Postgres looking for an older xlog as part of its start up consistency check?  If the xlogs were really applied as we can see in the logs can we skip over the next 7 some how to get the system to start applying the logs we have?  Thanks for the help.

--Colin