I guess I don't know the answer to your problem then. I was thinking that a full restore was takeing you 6 hours and, although a piecemeal restore bring the "guts" of the system online more quickly, it would still take about the same amount of time to ultimately peicemeal restore all of the filegroups.

Thanks for the BOL tip. I'd forgotten that peicemeal restores were handled differently for the SIMPLE recovery model.