On Wed, 10 Jul 2019 12:51:29 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

snip

I had a mobo (that eventually died on me) that would take around about a
minute and a half to pass bios tests when a USB webcam was plugged in

Never mind windows or linux, it never got that far.

There were no bios updates beyond that available.

snip

Did you take USB out of the boot sequence (or set it below the HDD)?

Cheers, T i m