light versions of emacs and getting it to start faster

[GI <gautam@math.uchicago.edu>]

Hi,
I'm interested in reducing the binary size of emacs, and getting it to start/load faster.

Reason: 
My current system (Redhat 7.2 on an i686) has an old version of emacs. My system administrator has not yet upgraded (and knowing him, it'll be a while ...). So I compiled my own version and have it somewhere in my homedirectory (on the network). I have to load up emacs multiple times in one session (I use it as my default editor in my mailreader - Mutt), and a large binary size stored remotely is painfully slow.

What I've done so far:
I compiled it (emacs 21.2) without X support. It reduced the binary size from 7MB to about 5. I can't get any lower than that.

I'm sure one can make the binary a lot smaller since the binary distributed by Redhat 7.3 is only about 4MB (and that has X support too!)

Also, it would be nice if emacs never loaded some pointless lisp files to begin with (like I never use the menu bar mode when i'm writiing emails). So if anyone knows how to strip down the lisp files emacs loads on startup to a bare minimum, that would also be helpful. But I guess what would give me most performace is killing the binary size!
Thanks,
Gautam