Another tidbit that hopefully will help other people. I acquired a Viglen Ultrabook 360 for the boss, and was going through standard setup - encrypt the SSD, set it all up, and then finally password the BIOS. Nothing out of the ordinary, until I tried to boot up and it refused to accept the password I'd set. I was incredibly confused (and rather concerned that I'd just bricked a brand new laptop!). Logged a support ticket, and prepared for an RMA, then took one last look out of curiosity.
I finally figured out some of the keypresses weren't being registered when I held down shift. Turns out that the default was to have numlock on on boot. On a laptop, with no number pad. Turning it off allowed me to enter the password correctly. Once disabled on startup in the BIOS, the problem naturally went away.
Hope this saves someone pulling out their hair like I did... I haven't got that much left to pull out! ;-)
