emacs and special chars (emoticons)

[henry atting]

I can live without emoticons but what people write via jabber 
(I use emacs jabber) looks ugly with all those substitute characters.
I thought it would be a good idea to install a font which contains all
these symbols (Symbola) and make it known to emacs with
unicode-fonts.el.
This appeared to be not a good idea.
Emacs startup time increased to about 5 minutes.
All the `tweaks' like

 unicode-fonts-existence-checks (quote none)
 unicode-fonts-restrict-to-fonts (quote ("Symbola")))
 unicode-fonts-skip-font-groups (quote ...)

did help nothing.

What would be the appropriate way to make emacs display emoticons (from
Symbola font)?