>  Thanks DR0ID...  Removing pygame.HWSURFACE was all I needed to do!  The
>  fade now runs in realtime on both the fullscreen and windowed display
>    

Hi

You know that pygame's perfomance in blitting surfaces depends on the 
formats you use. So for surfaces that have an alpha value (for speed) I 
recomend to use the convert_alpha( )  or the SRCALPHA flag when creating 
the surface (see the documentation for details). Once I did not use 
convert() on my surfaces and then I nearly doubled my speed because of 
using the convert().

~DR0ID