Wow, that worked

So I moved ntpdate to the multiuser part of startup, and hacked /etc/init.d/hwclockfirst.sh so it didn't query the timer to work out if setting the time had freakily failed (never happens on any machine I know!) (see previous post). Startup time is now 10s (graph). Zippy. (But of course, this is without starting XFree86.)