Yes, indoors take a whole lot longer to render. If you want realistic lighting there isn't much to do about it. You can however remove the roof, it will speed it up a lot, but obviously doesn't give the correct lighting for an indoor scene.

It's best to use simple emitters - low polygon planes - unless you can see the emitter clearly in the render. For example there's no use of using spheres for emitters on tiny lightbulbs that are far away.

The black dots are clearly a bug, they happend to me sometimes on a chrome material I used, but I think that disappeared in version 1.5. What version are you using?