There are several ways.
But what i usually do:
Lion:
1. The easiest (but not recommended by Gurus): Use Unibeast by tonymac to make an USB bootable Lion installer
2. Boot up the USB, if no KP, you'll able to see the installer windows.
3. Go to disk utilities, create 2 partition; GUID; 1 for mac, 1 for windows
4. once done, don't proceed the installation. restart, and put windows 7 dvd. before formatting the partition, please delete the partition, then recreate it back, it will produce an extra partition called System Reserved. Install windows into the news partition (not the System Reserved clearly).
5. Once finished, restart and boot the Lion USB, and proceed install the Lion OS into the other partition stated as in step 3.
6. Once finished installing Lion, install Chameleon bootloader. So, after this, every time u fire up your computer, you can reach your mac partition by the partition created in step 3. And also you can start the windows partition by boot up the System Reserved partition (not the windows partition)

There are several reason behind all of the step. And yeah, its work really well for me.
Man.. I'm not read your post carefully, seems like i'm not answering your prob. Sorry.