<p>What are the main reasons for having ridiculously long export times for a simple flash movie to swf? I have no unnecessary images or symbols, everything possible is set to lower than low and it still takes 10 minutes and upwards to export a 30 second animation at 24 fps. I have even created a new fla and pasted everything in there, to find out if it isn't maybe just a bug in flash. All other animations I've exported take a normal amount of time. </p>

<p>System specifications:
1GB DDR2 RAM
Intel Pentium D 3.4GHz</p>

<p>Should I upgrade my system?</p>

<p>Could it have something to do with having many symbols within symbols?</p>

<p>EDIT: Filesize of fla is 1.3 MB and swf is 500 KB. So not too big.</p>

unfortunately this is pretty average with flash.
You can check out this post on
actionscript.org
which talks about splitting up your project so save on compile time.
Back in the AS2 days an open source compiler called
MTASC
which dramatically reduced the
compile time
.  It has since turned into
Haxe
with AS2, AS3, Javascript, PHP, and Neko virtual machine all using the same syntax. The syntax used is similar to C++.
** EDIT **
Sorry I read the above as 10 seconds, not 10 minutes... sorry. ^_^