Well, no idea really. You can always try to downgrade to the previous BIOS version and check, can’t you?

P.S. I should point out I didn’t mean the real BIOS on your motherboard, VMWare has it’s own BIOS (which you can replace with a custom one after a bit of hacking, no idea about Virtual PC.) I only mentioned this b/c of the F8 boot menu/safe mode trick. With VMWare you can actually watch the POST on the virtual machine and the entire boot process, not really the case with Virtual PC as far as I can tell.