Here are a few tips that can speed up your Symbian emulator :

  deactivate your anti-virus program (specifically those running in background and scanning the files you open)

  prevent the emulator from writing debugging information to your hard disk. If you look in your TEMP folder, you may see a file called EPOCWIND.OUT. Over time, this grows and slows down the emulator. If you delete this file, re-create a new, empty document called EPOCWIND.OUT, then set that file as read-only, the emulator will no longer try to save these debugging stuff.

  remove *.PDB files. PDB (Programmer DataBase) files are created by Microsoft Visual Studio at compile time in debug builds. They contain information which assists debugging and stepping through code. However, when a DLL is loaded this PDB file is also referenced, significantly increasing the emulator boot time once more. By removing PDB files this overhead is also removed. During normal development the vast majority of these PDBs are not needed. When you are debugging your application you can simply replace the specific PDB files you need to use temporarily.

  rebase DLL files. When Windows loads the emulator DLL files it tries to load them into specific areas of memory, starting at an address specified in the DLL file. If something is already loaded in that area of memory a clash will occur and Windows will have to spend time trying to re-locate the DLL you are loading to the next available address. By rebasing all DLLs you can ensure that none of them clash with each other.

The following script (from Symbian) will perform the two latest tasks: