That being said, the problem he's having is due to the value of
password-word-equivalents

Do we know that for a fact?

Although it seems obvious to me, Drew can easily verify this by temporarily removing the non-ASCII characters from simple.el, restarting Emacs, and visiting the file.

While we're on the subject, free_realized_fontsets uses an inefficient algorithm and is likely related to the problem. So he might also try commenting out the body of free_realized_fontsets and seeing what happens.

Or better yet he could profile Emacs, either at a high level or via --enable-profiling.