Tests running on IE 8 and IE 9 are very slow using selenium 2.29 and IEDriverServer.exe

I run scripts using selenium version 2.29 and IEDriverServer.exe 64 in Internet Explorer 8 and 9, both of which are 64 bits. When I run these tests on firefox, it takes about 2 minutes, but in IE it takes about 20-40 minutes, and they don't start at all, they just get stuck. We are using Windows Server 2008 r2 and java jdk jdk1.7.0_11 64-bit. We transfer source certificates using

selenium.getWebDriver().navigate().to("javascript:document.getElementById('overridelink').click()");

Is there a way to make these tests faster. I even close the IEDriverServer.exe instance every time I close the browser.

Is there a way to speed up my tests?