[pdftex] Speeding up PDFLaTeX by skipping file inclusion

[Kevin]

Hello,

I recently started using PDFLaTeX in place of LaTeX+dvips+ps2pdf.
I also use BibTeX for references.  One thing I've noticed is that
PDFLaTeX reads over my figures twice.  (I have to run it more 
than once to get the BibTeX entries in.)  I suppose this is
a predictable effect of combining typesetting and output functions.
Here's a typical run sequence, repeating enough times to update
table of contents, etc.:

LaTeX:    latex -> bibtex -> latex -> latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf
PDFLaTeX: pdflatex -> bibtex -> pdflatex

I timed this (by wall clock) with an 80-odd page file that includes 
several large bitmap images as well as many vector images.  The
image files had already been processed into eps and jpg/pdf formats
for LaTeX and PDFLaTeX respectively.  The result was that PDFLaTeX
was significantly slower.  In particular, the LaTeX method was much
faster for draft copies where \usepackage[draft]{graphicx} had been
invoked, allowing dvips' to skip over the files.

It seems like this situation might be avoidable.  In the first run
I only want to generate enough info for BibTeX to do its thing.
Is there a switch or setting I am missing to speed things up?  I
tried latex->bibtex->pdflatex but the references didn't stick (it was
still slower anyway).

BTW: I *am* setting \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx} or
                    \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx} as appropriate

Thanks,

Kevin
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