Lucid incompatible with HP Mini 110 BIOS (F.15)

Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS does not start up well with the F.15 BIOS of HP Mini 110. [This wasn't a problem before and is once again not a problem now that I have reinstalled Karmic.]

The symptom is that if Lucid has been running on either the disk or a UNE stick, attempting to shutdown, hibernate, or suspend leads to a situation in which the computer is likely to wait 6.5 minutes before Lucid shows any signs of running or indeed to hang forever. The effect might be magnified by whether or not the computer was battery-powered when it went down. Note that "restart" seems to work more reliably than the others. Also note that the identity of the image that you are trying to bring up (in the shutdown or crash out of hang case) is irrelevant to the problem. So using a Lucid UNE stick as a live CD and then trying to reboot the installed Karmic exhibits the problem while using a Karmic UNR stick as a live CD and then rebooting the installed Lucid is uneventful.

I didn't find a way on HP's site to upgrade the BIOS running Linux; on the other hand there is nothing in the release notes about the newer ones that suggests this is fixed.