Tell us what your computer specs are please. Also tell us what the contents of your project primarily contain (vectors, bitmaps, etc). Also tell us the target of your publish (mobile app like IPA or SWF?).

If you're publishing a mobile app such as an IPA there will be no way to cut down on this. Even my dual quad xeons with 32gb ram take about a minute to produce a non-quick-publish IPA.

Your processor is a budget processor although not old. You have sufficient RAM and it must be new enough to use an i5 (DDR3) so that's fine but your video card doesn't matter when it comes to publish (all CPU/ram/HD).

However, you have 1819 items........ (!!!!!!!!!)

I've never had a library with more than 300 items and most of those were symbols of other assets.

Being the majority is vector you're not dealing with waiting for compression. If you have embedded a lot of fonts, you absolutely will suffer for this. Especially of you embed the entire set of glyphs with the font for all languages. Are you embedding lots of fonts?

BTW what is the total size of your SWF after export?

You must just be embedding a subset of the fonts, like just latin. That exports nearly instantly.

I think you need to chalk it up to having almost 2000 library element graphics. You could try unchecking "compress movie" in publish settings to see if Flash is taking a lot of time compressing your assets.

Why don't you try taking only 20 of those symbols in your library, copy them and paste them into a brand new document. Try exporting that document and see if it takes an abnormally long amount of time. Only 20 items should export in just a few seconds.

Yes Arial will always export lightning quick.

Compress movie was a chance that you used some bitmaps that might have agressive compression. Oh well.

You copied 120 symbols and received good results. Great! Try copying half your library and do the same. Soon you will find out which item is causing this gigantic halt.

Over a decade ago it took my old P4 about 5 minutes to export a movie I was making and I never knew why. It always ran very cruddy in one specific area too. I finally took a look inside one vector that was insanely complex and huge (like 3000x3000 size 8 years ago is HUGE). It was being scaled down to 5% of its size to fit on screen haha. I simply exported it to a bitmap and all of a sudden everything was fixed. Lots of these things happen. You just need to find out what part of your library is causing issues. So I'd keep copying more and more symbols while exporting until all of a sudden you copy, export and it takes forever. Then you know what the culprit is.

In my experience the 2 things that have ALWAYS caused a ridiculos amount of time to export is audio and fonts with all glyphs exported.