Harmy said:

At first I was a bit disappointed with the rendering speed in After Effects (BTW, I'd like to thank Chris Solo for donating the entire Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium package to me!) but then I realized I didn't have multi-threading turned on - after that, it runs like lightning

You can get even faster by not rendering through the main AE program, but by using its command line renderer. This can be done quite easily with the free AE render manager. Just setup your render queue as usual, save the project, close AE and open the project with that tool.