Erratic boot time for XPS9000 (435T)

It's because the Logitech keyboard probably has a USB hub (mine does) and a small bit of memory to handle the onboard keyboard settings. In general, if you have a working computer it's best to disable boot devices you aren't going to use.  That includes network booting, USB booting, and even the CDROM drive if you know you aren't going to use it.  I still haven't figured out what makes some USB drives (or keyboards) show up as acceptable boot devices to the BIOS.  But when they do - it has to wait to fail on that device before it goes over the the hard drive like it should.

I'm not so sure it's the USB hub on the keyboard that's causing the problem.  I'm using a Logitech G-15 gaming KB with my XPS9000.  This KB also has USB ports on it, but I don't have any slow/erratic boot issues.  I'm using Win7 Ultimate 64-bit.  I did find that the ports the USB peripherals are plugged in to makes a difference.  I've found one port configuration that seems to work fine for my USB stuff.  If I change any of those around, I get slow/erratic boots and sometimes boot hangs.  My guess is that there is some conflict/issues with the order in which the USB ports are initialized, and the timing of the driver loads for those peripherals.  Play around with the port configuration to see if one combination works better than the others.  I'm running:

Logitech G-15 keyboard, Logitech G-5 mouse, Western Digital 500Gb Passport external USB HDD, and an Apple iPhone USB connection.

Furthermore, the Logitech Illuminated Keyboard doesn't even have a USB  hub yet is still causing boot hangups. I read on the Logitech forums the issue is because the BIOS sees the keyboard as a storage device and attempts to shake hands with the device, for about 2 minutes, until it times out and the computer boots normally. This is really a frustrating situation if I do say so myself...

I won't repeat everything I wrote in the other thread linked above, but I have a stock, plain vanilla Dell USB keyboard and I've had this intermittent slow boot problem on my 435T since I bought it back in May.