Like everyone else in the world, I've been asking myself how I can increase the performance of the Android emulator.  Dear god, the emulator is a poor performer.  I mean bad, as in really bad.  I was at AnDevCon this week.  While there, I met Eric Cloninger and Mike Wolfson.  Both had a couple of suggestions for increasing performance and fixing the little annoying issues.  If you want to fix this with MonoDroid, then here's the command that I issued to start the emulator:

emulator @AvdName -no-boot-anim -partition-size 512 -scale .75

• The @AvdName param is the name of the Avd that you want to start.
• -no-boot-anim tells the emulator not to not show the cool wavy (annoying?) Android emulator graphic.  This turns startup on my system from about a minute to a few seconds.
• -partition-size 512 sets the partition size.  This is needed by MonoDroid.
• -scale .75 sets the scaling of the emulator image.It supports numbers between .1 and 3.  Setting this to a value of less than 1 means that there are fewer pixels to move around in memory.  More than 1 means that there are more pixels to move around in memory.

Finally, while not an emulator option on startup, I find that the emulator starts up without network connectivity a number of times.  To toggle network connectivity, use the f8 key.  It does seem to turn on properly.

Having done this, your MonoDroid app will see the running instance and will allow you to connect to it, just like you had started it inside of Visual Studio (or MonoDevelop).