Is it possible to remove the fade effect between login?

(Posting this as an answer so later visitors can see it better.)

Based on the comments above, it seems there's no way to remove the fade in on screen unlock. It seems that the fade-out/ fade in animation is actually covering for Windows doing something when it unlocks the screen (much like the black flash you get if you hit control-alt-delete between the normal desktop and the lock menu). If there was no animation, the lockscreen would probably not take any less time to enter or exit, it would instead appear to hang for anywhere from half a second to a couple of seconds (depending on your computer) on a black screen. That is, the animation itself isn't the source of the delay, it's an attempt by Windows to mask the delay.

To avoid screen flicker when unnecessary animations turned off, I went to: Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Personalization and chose "Windows 7 basic".