I wish there was a way for me to get this info to the Dell Engineers.  I spoke to Technical Support and they sent someone to my house w/ a new Motherboard and HD.  Upgrading from A12 to A13 on (at least) the XPS 1645 platform causes a large (30+ second) delay to be introduced when you use HD passwords.  It doesn't affect Supervisor passwords on bootup, even if you have the 'Boot up password' option set, which uses the Supervisor password.  It does have the same delay if you press F2 to go to the BIOS while there is any password enabled.

To be clear:

 -  enabling just the Supervisor password, with or without the Boot Password option being enabled, does _NOT_ inject the 30+ second delay in the bootup process, when you are going to Windows.  The delay *IS* there if you press F2 to go to the BIOS.

 - enabling the HD password at all causes the 30+ second delay to be injected prior to your being presented with the password prompt from the BIOS.

 This specifically came about with A13.  A12 does not exhibit it, but, A12 (and several versions prior) does have a problem where the keyboard is not recognized after the BIOS password prompt appears, for at least 10-20 seconds.  It eventually is recognized, but it takes quite a bit of time.

There is _no_ delay without a BIOS password being enabled.

I tried many combinations of this and can give a very thorough report of how this happens if a Dell Engineer would like to contact me.  I sent the technician back without changing the motherboard/HD because the only difference would've been the replacement motherboard was running A11, which I'd have had to update anyway.

Stewart Davos