Yeah 14 hours still seems pretty excessive to me. Sounds about right for a 1Ghz Mac, but newer machines should be able to crank things out a bit faster.
I would definitely up your RAM for a AE box. It might be that you are using high-res images that need to swap all the time instead of just rendering in RAM.
The big culprit in something like this would be your images being too large. After Effects really starts to choke when you use huge high res images.
Can we get a look at what you are doing – maybe it would provide some clues as to why you are waiting so long.