Speeding up Views 2?
You can try installing DB Tuner and/or run mysqltuner.pl and experiment with the suggestions.

Edit to address the comments.

In addition to trying to optimize the database itself, you can also copy/paste the SQL that Views generates and run the query manually with an EXPLAIN.  This may shed some light on why the query is taking a while to run.  You can then edit the view as needed, and potentially add some indexes that the above tools may not have identified.